Welcome to the July 2025 issue of your favorite quirky tech newsletter. Before we get into the stories, I have an important announcement to share:

Due to ongoing budget constraints, this will be the last issue of Bizarro Devs. Unfortunately, as much as we all love this newsletter, our parent company has made the difficult decision to discontinue it.

Having said that, I plan on personally carrying on the Bizarro Devs tradition on my own time in the near future (possibly as early as next month). Please go to devtech.news and add your email, as that will be the new home of some version of this newsletter.

With that out of the way, here are this month’s headliners:

• 🔄💻 New Breakthrough AI Method Tests Code in Real-Time, Beats GPT-4

• 🍟🤖 McDonald's Scraps Drive-Through AI After Bacon Ice Cream Debacle

• 💾📅 AI Researchers Hunt for "Clean" Pre-2022 Data

The lead story is actually very fascinating and hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves in the wider tech press, but perhaps that will change with it being featured here.

Enjoy the read!

📰 From the Newsroom

🔄💻 New Breakthrough AI Method Tests Code in Real-Time, Beats GPT-4

A few months ago, vibe coding took the internet by storm, but as its popularity has grown, so have the justifiable criticisms of its limitations. We covered that story back in April, but recently a group of researchers produced a new system that may put the vibe coding criticisms to bed. Dubbed Execution-Guided Classifier-Free Guidance, or EG-CFG for short, it addresses the fundamental problem of using AI to code, which is that it’s prone to errors. Here’s how it works…

• Instead of generating complete programs and crossing its digital fingers, EG-CFG writes code line-by-line while actually executing and testing each piece as it goes. It generates several possible next lines, runs them against test cases, sees which ones work, and uses that feedback to guide what comes next. This mirrors how human programmers iteratively test and adjust their code during development.

• The performance jump in testing has been massive. Using only open-source DeepSeek models, EG-CFG hit 96.6% accuracy on MBPP coding tasks (compared to GPT-4's 87.7%), 87.19% on extended HumanEval tests, and 58.18% on competitive programming problems where GPT-4 managed just 34.7%.

• The best part of all this is that these results came from open-source models that anyone can access, not proprietary systems costing millions to train. The researchers proved that smart techniques can beat raw computational power. Their system also naturally supports parallel processing where multiple agents explore different coding approaches simultaneously.

EG-CFG could be the reliability upgrade vibe coding has been desperately needing since its inception. If AI coding assistants can actually test their own work line-by-line, it could transform vibe coding from "fun but risky" to "genuinely practical." And I can finally stop seeing five posts per day on my LinkedIn thread about how it’s irresponsible to use.

🍟🤖 McDonald's Scraps Drive-Through AI After Bacon Ice Cream Debacle

AI company CEOs keep insisting that AGI is just around the corner and millions of jobs will be automated away in the next few years (see here, here, here, here, and more). Meanwhile, McDonald's just pulled the plug on their drive-through AI system after five years of testing, and the reason why might make you feel better about human job security.

• It turns out that despite the hype, McDonald’s "revolutionary" technology had a few issues. Examples include: A woman trying to order caramel ice cream but getting multiple portions of butter added to her bill instead; two women receiving hundreds of dollars worth of chicken nuggets applied to their order; and a person being given an ice cream topped with bacon.

• Apparently the AI has had trouble distinguishing between customer voices and background noise, and it’s been struggling with accents as well. McDonald's franchisees have reported that the technology has been "underwhelming," which seems like a polite way to describe it.

• The industry response has been predictably tone-deaf. Despite McDonald's obvious failure, other chains are doubling down on AI drive-throughs. Wendy's, Dunkin', and Hardee's are all testing similar systems, while Yum Brands announced an "AI-first mentality" claiming the possibilities are "endless."

The McDonald's debacle perfectly captures the gap between AI hype and AI reality. While tech evangelists proclaim the imminent automation of everything, in the real world, AI can't seem to handle a basic drive-through order. To bridge the capability gap, some companies have even resorted to faking the funk by employing workers from cheap labor countries to make it seem like their AI is better than it actually is. It makes me wonder if when we “finally achieve AGI,” if it will really just be a group of really smart dudes hanging out in a cubicle in Bengaluru responding to prompts half a world away (I’m joking. Maybe. 😅).

💾📅 AI Researchers Hunt for "Clean" Pre-2022 Data

Did you know that nuclear testing in the 1940s permanently contaminated the world's metal supply? It forced scientists to salvage steel from sunken German warships for sensitive equipment. Now academics are saying that ChatGPT's launch did something eerily similar to the internet, and they're scrambling to find "clean" data from before November 2022.

• The parallel is surprisingly accurate. Just like nuclear fallout made all post-1945 steel "dirty" for precision instruments, researchers worry that post-ChatGPT internet content is polluted with AI-generated text. It means that AI output is becoming progressively less reliable, like making a photocopy of a photocopy until everything gets hopelessly blurry.

• It also means that early AI players are sitting on treasure troves of uncontaminated training data that new startups simply can't access. And these pre-2022 datasets might give them a permanent advantage over newcomers.

• The fix isn't straightforward. Some have proposed federated learning systems where clean data owners let others train models without sharing the actual datasets, but that creates new problems around privacy, security, and political control of these data vaults.

What makes this particularly tricky is the irreversibility factor. As one researcher put it: "If you've completely contaminated all your datasets, cleaning is going to be prohibitively expensive, probably impossible." While this article mainly focuses on the "self-harm" aspect of AI, another (arguably more important) thing to consider is the future of the internet itself. What is the web going to look like in another 5 years when AI-generated content dwarfs human-produced content by some crazy ratio?

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• Ever heard of the Pentagon Pizza Index? It has accurately predicted major U.S. military actions since the 1980s and there’s even an X account that offers real-time updates on Pentagon-area pizza orders as a way of "reading U.S. military tea leaves."

• If you’re thinking of getting into the wonderful world of web accessibility, then you’ll need a primer on ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications). Here’s a great breakdown from Eric Bailey, a longtime advocate of accessible web design.

• Stanford legal expert Mark Lemley found that Meta's LLaMA AI can reproduce verbatim passages from copyrighted books like "Harry Potter," potentially exposing the company to nearly $1 billion in statutory damages.

• CNBC recently reported that Google uses YouTube's 20 billion video library to train AI models including Gemini and Veo 3, but most creators and media companies remain unaware this is happening - and there’s no way to opt out.

• Nekojita FuFu is a tiny cat-shaped robot that attaches to cups and bowls to blow air and cool hot drinks and food. Its Kickstarter campaign massively exceeded expectations, reaching over 3,167% of its original funding goal with ¥18.1 million raised against an initial target of ¥572,000.

• Researchers have developed a robotic skin made from conductive gel that can detect pressure, temperature, pain, and damage simultaneously across its entire surface, sensing signals from over 860,000 pathways in the material.

• Scientists have successfully tested swarms of microscopic robots, each smaller than a speck of dust, that can be injected into sinus cavities to treat bacterial infections by heating up and catalyzing chemical reactions to kill bacteria.

• 🎥🎞️ Meet Chris Smith, a 32 year old married man and father of a two-year old daughter. Chris built an AI companion using ChatGPT and ended up "falling in love" with it - to the point he cried for 30 minutes when his "companion" reached the 100,000 word limit and he had to start a new chat with it.

• 🎥🎞️ Do you use WordPress? If you answered "yes," then there’s probably a decent chance that you either use or have used the popular Yoast SEO plugin. What you might not know about Yoast though, is that even if you delete it from your site, it leaves behind a mess of files. Here’s a helpful video that shows you how to fully remove Yoast so it leaves nothing behind.

• Hostinger is a company primarily known for being a major player in the web hosting market, but recently they decided to branch out from their core business by launching an AI coding tool. I took it for a test run - two test runs actually - and wrote about the experience in detail.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“A sunset is nothing more and nothing less than the backside of a sunrise.”

– Craig D. Lounsbrough

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 2,770 days elapsed between the publication of the very first issue of Bizarro Devs on the 29th of November 2017, and the publication of the last issue that you are currently reading on your screen. A lot happened over the course of that time, both in the world of technology and with the newsletter itself.

• $13,900,000,000 USD will be equally shared among 100+ children fathered by Telegram founder Pavel Durov through both relationships and sperm donations. The 40-year-old Russian-born tech tycoon told French magazine Le Point that he makes no distinction between his six children from relationships and those conceived through donation.

• $1,600 USD is the price for Meticulous's new robotic espresso machine, which the company claims is the world's first to use robotics, precision sensors, and smart algorithms to replicate café-quality hand-pulled espresso shots at home.

• 6 months is how long printer manufacturer Procolored unknowingly distributed malware-infected official software and drivers for at least six of its printer models, including a remote access trojan called XRedRAT and a cryptocurrency stealer called SnipVex that has stolen nearly $1 million worth of Bitcoin.

• 7.3 terabits per second was the unprecedented size of a DDoS attack that Cloudflare successfully blocked in mid-May 2025, setting a new world record that was 12% larger than any previously recorded attack. The 45-second assault delivered 37.4 terabytes of malicious traffic targeting a hosting provider, originating from over 122,145 source IP addresses across 161 countries.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Coding Courses: This collection of coding courses is easy to navigate and offers a mix of free and discounted options to boost your skills. As of the time of this writing, there are around 50 free courses, catering to beginners, experienced coders, and everyone in between.

https://www.courses.reviews/

NGX-VFlow: This is an Angular library for creating node-based applications. It can help you build anything from a static diagram to a visual editor. You can use the default design or apply your own by customizing everything using (mostly) HTML and CSS. Just describe your flow with a simple API and all of the heavy lifting, such as dragging, zooming, and curve math, is handled by the library for you.

https://www.ngx-vflow.org/

Oxlint 1.0: This Rust-powered JavaScript and TypeScript linter, has been released with 50-100x performance improvements over ESLint and support for over 500 ESLint rules. Major companies including Shopify, Airbnb, and Mercedes-Benz have adopted it, with Mercedes-Benz seeing up to 97% speedup and Airbnb completing linting on 126,000+ files in just 7 seconds where ESLint times out.

https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-oxlint-1-stable

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Both of the above photos are of U.S. President William H. Taft. One was taken in 1908, when the President wasn’t yet the President, but the Secretary of War. The other was produced in 1923 as a psychological tool to make the people of the Philippines believe that the U.S. had good intentions toward them.

You can probably figure out which is which, but the more interesting story here is that fake photos and image manipulation have been around much, much longer than modern smartphone filters, AI tools, Photoshop, or even computers for that matter.

And even though digital photo manipulation is so readily accessible nowadays, analog image manipulation actually has a much longer history that dates all the way back to the 19th century. Read the full story.

💬 What’s the Word?

For our final word of the month, I wanted to share a word from my own language that perfectly captures how I'm feeling about this newsletter coming to an end: ľútosť.

Ľútosť is a Slovak word that you might translate as "feeling sorry for (someone)," but it goes deeper than that. It's a complex emotion that combines regret, sorrow, and genuine compassion - often for circumstances beyond anyone's control.

The beauty of ľútosť is that it doesn't demand that we fix anything or look on the bright side. In the context of this being the final Bizarro Devs issue, it simply acknowledges that endings carry weight, even when new beginnings are already taking shape. Which, as you know, they are. 😉

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Onwards and Upwards

Thank you for reading!

I’ve been running this newsletter and curating the content for it for almost three years - since issue 135 - and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I’m grateful to our company, Vertigo Studio, for entrusting me with the responsibility. I’m also extremely thankful for my colleagues Sabina Ionescu and Karol Król for their guidance.

Sabina was the original architect of the newsletter and came up with the entire concept, and Karol was the one who handed it off to me and helped me craft my first few issues. He’s also been the first person to read every single issue before it’s gone live, and his feedback has helped me finalize each one before it reached your inbox.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the numerous talented writers who contributed to the newsletter over the years. Tom Rankin, Adelina Tuca, Joe Warnimont, Diana Gunn, and others all helped to make it successful before I took the reigns.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Bizarro Devs as much as I’ve enjoyed producing it. If you’d like to continue along on this journey, please go to devtech.news and I will see you there in the near future.

Until we meet again,
– Martin Dubovic

For those of you who are new here - welcome. For our returning and long-time readers - it’s nice to see you again. Grab your favorite beverage, get comfortable, and enjoy this month’s lineup of stories, stats, tools, and more. Let’s kick it off with our headliners:

• ⚡🎬 5-Second AI Video = 1 Hour Microwave Time

• 🤖📝 Students Are Now Asking AI to Add Typos to Fool Teachers

• 🖨️🫀 Scientists 3D Print Inside Bodies Without Surgery

Enjoy and say hello in the comments. Don’t worry, no one’s going to bite you. Maybe.

📰 From the Newsroom

⚡🎬 5-Second AI Video = 1 Hour Microwave Time

MIT Technology Review recently conducted a comprehensive new investigation into AI's energy appetite and their analysis revealed that the technology is quietly reshaping America's entire power grid - and we're largely in the dark about the true scope of what's coming.

• Energy costs of using AI vary wildly depending on what you're asking it to do. Simple text responses range from running a microwave for 1/10th of a second to 8 full seconds. In comparison, generating a high-quality image takes ~5.5 seconds of microwave time. However, all of those pale in comparison to creating a 5-second video, which requires over an hour of microwave energy!

• By 2028, AI alone could consume enough electricity to power 22% of all U.S. households if that power were redirected to homes instead. Meanwhile, data centers overall (which include AI plus everything else) are projected to grow from their current 4.4% of total U.S. electricity consumption to 12% by 2028.

• U.S. citizens might end up indirectly subsidizing this AI revolution even if they don’t use a single AI tool. New research shows that utility deals with tech companies often pass costs to regular consumers through higher electricity bills. For example, Virginia residents could see an extra $37.50 monthly charge to subsidize new data centers.

The most troubling aspect of this is that we're flying blind into an energy-intensive future because AI companies won't share real usage data, claiming trade secrets. As one researcher put it: "All bets are off in the coming years" as AI agents, reasoning models, and personalized AI multiply our current usage exponentially. What started as innocent chatbot queries is rapidly becoming one of the biggest energy stories of our time.

🤖📝 Higher Learning Has Turned Into an AI Arms Race Between Professors and Students

The academic cheating arms race has reached new levels of absurdity. According to a New York Magazine investigation, students aren't just using AI to write their papers - they're coaching chatbots to write poorly on purpose, complete with typos and freshman-level mistakes, to avoid detection by teachers and AI-detection software.

• The real overachievers have developed a multi-step "laundering" process: write an essay with one AI tool, feed that output into a second AI chatbot, then run it through a third one to dilute any telltale AI patterns. It's like money laundering, but for intelligence.

• The strategy doesn't always work, especially when students know so little about their subject that they can't spot AI nonsense. University of Iowa TA Sam Williams watched his class turn in heartfelt personal essays one week, then submit AI-generated reports about "the history of New Orleans jazz featuring Elvis Presley" the next week. Elvis, of course, had nothing to do with jazz or New Orleans.

• Some teachers are fighting back by going old school - bringing back handwritten Blue Book exams where students must write essays in class with pen and paper, eliminating any chance to run their work through multiple AI tools.

While I don’t condone cheating and I think that ultimately these students are doing themselves a disservice, there is also a counterpoint to consider here. On the one hand, those who cheat using AI tools are missing out on the knowledge they would have gained otherwise. Not to mention they are paying college tuition to not learn. But on the other hand, they are training themselves to become efficient prompt engineers. Maybe there’s a happy middle ground? What do you think?

🖨️🫀 Scientists 3D Print Inside Bodies Without Surgery

Forget everything you know about medical implants and tissue repair. A team from Caltech just unveiled technology that can 3D print tissues, drug depots, and biosensors directly inside your body using nothing more than an injection and ultrasound waves. This breakthrough could eliminate the need for invasive surgeries to place implants or repair damaged tissues.

• The system, called DISP (deep tissue in vivo sound printing), uses a special "sono-ink" that stays liquid at body temperature but solidifies into precise structures when blasted with ultrasound. Unlike light-based 3D printing that can barely penetrate skin, ultrasound can reach nearly 8 inches deep into organs without causing damage.

• The researchers used DISP to create drug depots that slowly release cancer medications directly at tumor sites (instead of being flushed away in hours like current treatments). They also printed electronic biosensors to monitor tissue activity, and even repaired tissue damage.

• The injectable ink includes multiple smart components: molecules that link together when triggered, fatty bubbles filled with binding agents that release when hit with ultrasound, and tracking molecules that light up so doctors can monitor the printing process. Any excess ink is safely broken down by the body's natural processes, and the technology doesn't trigger immune responses.

While there are still challenges (like printing on moving organs such as lungs and hearts), researchers believe AI could help solve these issues by rapidly adjusting to changes in the body during printing. This isn't science fiction anymore - it's the future of personalized medicine, where your body becomes its own 3D printer for exactly the treatments you need, exactly where you need them.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• Researchers have developed a new laser amplifier that can transmit information 10 times faster than current fiber-optic systems by expanding the bandwidth from 30 nanometers to 300 nanometers. The silicon nitride amplifier uses spiral waveguides and could improve internet speeds while enabling more precise medical imaging and diagnostics.

• Modern web frameworks like Next.js can use React Server Components to build completely static websites by running server code during the build process and saving the outputs as static files. This "hybrid" approach gives developers the benefits of server-side features while allowing for free static hosting.

• A senior React developer shared their experience with a technical interview at a major tech company, detailing a 60-minute assessment where they built a "Dress Sales Tracker" application with progressively complex requirements.

• Stack Overflow, once the go-to hub for programmers seeking help, has hit a grim milestone. Recent data shows question volume has plummeted to levels not seen since the site's 2009 launch. This dramatic cliff dive signals what might be the final chapter for a platform that revolutionized developer collaboration.

• A lot of organizations are using AI at work these days, but far less have explained exactly how they’re using it. Mark Zahra wrote a useful blog post on this topic, where he peeled back the curtains on how WP Mayor has been leveraging AI to improve their workflows. Check it out for ideas you can borrow.

• Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski admitted the company's AI-first customer service strategy that replaced 700 human workers led to lower quality support, prompting a strategic pivot to rehire human agents through a remote, on-demand model.

• Scientists have developed a laser system that can read text in a book from 0.85 miles / 1.37 km away by using intensity interferometry - a technique normally used in astronomy to measure distant stars - with eight infrared laser beams that can detect individual letters just 3 millimeters across.

• 🎥🎞️ At a recent E.U. summit, the host country of Albania, welcomed the visiting leaders of European countries with an AI-generated video depicting all of them as toddlers. It seemed to be a hit among the crowd and the leaders themselves, but definitely qualifies as bizzaro.

• The annual I/O developers conference hosted by Google resulted in over 100 new AI tools and features being released (or ones that will soon be released). I tested a few of them. Here are my top six, as well as my thoughts on Google’s AI strategy.

• Have you ever wanted to run multiple domains off of a single WordPress installation? If you didn’t think that was even possible - it actually is. All you need is the WP Landing Kit plugin. Check out the breakdown of how it all works.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“Nobody expects a computer simulation of a hurricane to generate real wind and real rain. In the same way, a computer model of the brain may only ever simulate consciousness, but never give rise to it.”

– Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than 20 years.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 63% of people think that Google search results were better the previous year, according to a recent WalletHub study published in February 2025 that evaluated search results for financial products. The study found that only 41% of Google's top 10 search results actually meet user intent, and trusting Google's top 5 results could cost consumers an average of $202 due to suboptimal financial product recommendations.

• 73.6% of Alphabet's (Google’s parent company) $237.9 billion in ad revenue came from Google Search in 2023 - totaling $175.0 billion according to Yahoo Finance.

• 200,000,000 years old is how old the world's most heavily guarded tree species is. The Wollemi pine, a "living fossil" was rediscovered in 1994 in Australia, but there are fewer than 100 mature trees left in the wild. They are classified as critically endangered and remain under strict biosecurity protection against pathogens and poaching.

• £40,000 - £60,000 is the estimated range that Alan Turing's rare signed 1939 PhD dissertation is expected to fetch at auction, as part of a remarkable archive of the computing pioneer's papers that was nearly destroyed during an attic clear-out before being rescued by family members in 2024. The entire archive goes to auction this month.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Motion: This open source motion library boasts first-class APIs for both JavaScript and React. It combines the power of JavaScript animations with the performance of native browser APIs.

https://motion.dev/

React ChronoSmart: This React timeline component offers versatile display options with three viewing modes (Horizontal, Vertical, and Tree). It features a straightforward data-driven API, fully customizable styling, TypeScript support for better code quality, nested timeline capabilities for complex hierarchies, and built-in slideshow functionality with various animation effects. Perfect for creating visually appealing, interactive timelines in your React projects.

https://react-chrono.prabhumurthy.com/

Pages CMS: This GitHub-based content management system makes updating static sites painless without wrestling with Git or YAML files. Perfect for Next.js, Astro, Hugo, and Nuxt projects, it provides a friendly interface with visual editing, media management, search capabilities, and content scheduling - all running directly on GitHub. It's completely free to use and works with many popular static site generators.

https://pagescms.org/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Cliché, but true: perspective is everything. Next time you feel pressure, remind yourself that in an alternate reality, you could be this guy.

💬 What’s the Word?

積ん読 (Tsundoku) is a Japanese word that translates into the act of buying books and letting them pile up unread. Something akin to a book hoarder.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Pledge Your Support

We recently turned on the pledges ask in Substack. Here’s why:

Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 168 issues, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of.

Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm changes in the past year have put a significant dent in our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.”

There is a very real possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own past the summer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive.

Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that.

Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading!

If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join us on the first Tuesday of every month.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin D.

Welcome to the May 2025 issue of your favorite quirky tech newsletter. We’ve got all sorts of interesting stories for you, ranging from AI-powered police robots in Thailand to the latest innovations in zipper technology. Bet you didn’t think that zippers could somehow be made next-level, did you? Well…keep reading. But first, let’s begin with our top stories this month:

• 🖥️🚨 Employee Monitoring App Leaks 21M Screenshots

• 🏃‍♂️💬 AI Support Bot Causes Subscription Exodus

• 🚀👨‍💻 Developer Renaissance Coming Despite AI Hype

Thanks for being here. We appreciate you.

📰 From the Newsroom

🖥️🚨 Employee Monitoring App Leaks 21M Screenshots

WorkComposer, a surveillance tool used by over 200,000 companies worldwide to monitor employee productivity, suffered a massive security breach when researchers discovered more than 21 million employee screenshots exposed in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. The leak has raised serious questions about workplace surveillance practices and the security risks they pose.

• The leaked screenshots were captured every 3-5 minutes from employees' computers as part of WorkComposer's monitoring services. These images potentially contained highly sensitive information including internal communications, login credentials, API keys, personal emails, and financial documents. In other words, a goldmine for cybercriminals.

• Beyond the immediate security concerns, the breach highlights the controversial nature of workplace surveillance itself. According to the American Psychological Association, 56% of digitally surveilled workers report feeling tense or stressed compared to 40% of non-monitored employees.

• This isn't the first such incident in the employee monitoring space. Earlier this year, Cybernews uncovered a similar leak by WebWork that exposed over 13 million screenshots. Both cases illustrate how surveillance tools meant to ensure productivity are creating significant legal and ethical problems.

WorkComposer has since secured the exposed data, but the damage may have already been done. José Martinez from the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the incident as follows: "If a worker committed the kind of incompetence that WorkComposer did, this data might be used to fire them. WorkComposer, too, should be out of a job." I can’t say I disagree.

🏃‍♂️💬 AI Support Bot Causes Subscription Exodus

AI coding assistant startup Cursor, which has recently been valued at nearly $10 billion, faced major backlash last month after its customer support bot went rogue. The company suddenly found itself at the center of a PR disaster in the latest example of AI replacing humans only for it to backfire.

• The trouble began when users reported being mysteriously logged out when switching between devices. When they contacted customer support, an AI bot named "Sam" confidently informed them this was "expected behavior" under a new login policy - except no such policy existed. The explanation was completely hallucinated by the AI.

• As the news spread across developer communities on Hacker News and Reddit, the subscription cancellations started rolling in. Cofounder Michael Truell eventually acknowledged the "incorrect response from a front-line AI support bot" on Reddit and mentioned they were investigating a bug causing the logouts.

• For many customers, the damage was already done. One user, Melanie Warrick of Fight Health Insurance, shared how she stopped using Cursor after receiving "the same canned, likely AI-generated response multiple times" for an unresolved issue.

Other companies like Air Canada, Chevrolet, and DPD have faced similar issues with their own AI chatbots. So the question now is - are any companies going to change course? Or will they just double down and hope that the problems will iterate themselves away as the technology continues to improve? My guess is that their quarterly earnings calls will push them towards the latter.

🚀👨‍💻 Developer Renaissance Coming Despite AI Hype

A little over two years ago, developer Josh Comeau published a blog post titled "The End of Front-End Development." In that post, he addressed the anxiety that existed at that time (and hasn’t fully gone away) about AI taking over developer jobs. Last month he published a new post that serves as an update to that original piece and that examines how things have changed.

• In his follow up, he argues that reports of AI writing "25% of Google's code" are misleading. In reality, human developers are still creating 100% of the code, just using AI as one of many tools. As he explains: "It's not like product teams at Google have fired 25% of their developers and replaced them with pseudo-sentient AI robots." Even "autonomous" coding AI like Devin has disappointed in real-world tests, with one team finding it could only complete 3 out of 20 assigned tasks.

• Comeau's personal experience with AI coding tools like Cursor reveals both strengths and limitations. He compares using AI to highway driving with cruise control - it works great but requires constant human supervision to avoid "drifting off-road." But without coding knowledge, users can't identify when AI output needs correction.

• So while the job market remains tough for developers, Comeau points to macroeconomic factors, recent tech layoffs, and overblown AI myths as the causes - not actual developer replacement. He predicts a "developer renaissance" within a year or two as companies realize "a skilled human armed with a powerful LLM can do incredible things."

Despite continued improvements in AI models, Comeau remains convinced that coding is still an incredibly valuable skill with a bright future. I happen to agree and I’ve been saying for months now that the same applies to many other jobs (see previous story). I’m hoping that voices like Comeau get elevated high enough that decision makers begin to realize that the path forward is human + AI collaboration and not AI replacement of humans.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• Thailand has deployed its first AI-powered police robot, dubbed "AI Police Cyborg 1.0." It features 360-degree smart cameras connected to a command center, real-time facial recognition, behavior analysis to detect fights or disturbances, and weapon recognition technology.

• Researchers at King's College London have achieved a breakthrough that could one day enable adults to grow replacement teeth instead of getting fillings or implants by developing a special material that allows tooth cells to communicate and slowly release signals over time, mimicking natural tooth development.

• Meta's content moderators in Ghana are suffering severe psychological harm from exposure to extreme violent content including beheadings and watching people get skinned alive. The outsourcing company, Teleperformance, is accused of inadequate support, underpaying workers, and dismissing anyone who speaks out about working conditions.

• LLMs are dramatically shrinking the timeline between vulnerability disclosure and functional exploit code. Recently, security expert Matthew Keely demonstrated how ChatGPT and Claude created working attack code for a critical Erlang SSH vulnerability in only hours rather than days or weeks.

• Apple's WebKit team is proposing "Item Flow," a unified layout system that would merge concepts from CSS Flexbox and Grid into a coherent set of properties. It could potentially solve layout challenges like masonry/waterfall patterns while adding new features like dense packing for Flexbox, and more.

• If you want to improve web performance, reduce load times, and avoid wasting users' bandwidth (especially on mobile), it's essential to minimize your HTML file size. Here are five techniques that can shrink your files by up to 90%.

• Browser vendors are removing default styling that makes <h1> elements appear smaller when nested within sectioning elements (<section>, <article>, <nav>, and <aside>). Moving forward, developers need to explicitly define font sizes for these headings or face Lighthouse warnings.

• 🎥🎞️ YKK is a Japanese company that makes zippers. They are, in fact, the world’s largest zipper maker (in case you ever get asked in a trivia game). About two weeks ago they released a 30-second video that shows how they are pushing the boundaries of zipper innovation with automated zippers.

• Roo Code significantly enhances development workflows when used strategically, according to software developer Gage Vander Clay. The key to success is maintaining project context through tools like Memory Bank, which creates structured files that help Roo remember important details between sessions.

• A2 Hosting, a mainstay in the web hosting space for over two decades, has officially rebranded into Hosting.com. As part of the rebranding, they’ve completely redesigned their website with a significantly brighter color palette and a much more modern feel.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“Cybertruck will be waterproof enough to serve briefly as a boat, so it can cross rivers, lakes and even seas that aren’t too choppy.”

– Elon Musk’s tweet about Cybertruck’s capabilities has resurfaced after a Cybertruck owner from California took him at his word and decided to test his own Cybertruck.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 16.5 months of development time was saved when Airbnb used LLMs to migrate 3,500 React component test files from Enzyme to React Testing Library in just 6 weeks instead of the originally estimated 1.5 years. Their systematic approach combined frontier AI models with a step-based validation pipeline that successfully automated 97% of the migration.

• 23,500+ tech employees have been laid off this year across 93 companies (as of last month). This includes Automattic, which recently laid off 281 of their staff, and Google, which also recently fired hundreds of employees working on their Android and Pixel teams.

• £9,750 is the cost of a luxury microplastic "detox" treatment at London's Clarify Clinics, which claims to filter plastics and forever chemicals from patients' blood through a two-hour procedure that draws blood, processes plasma through a proprietary system, and returns it to the body.

• $500,000 is the membership fee for the brand new, invite-only social club launched in Washington DC by Donald Trump Jr. and wealthy investors. Reportedly, some people on the waiting list have offered to pay double the fee to be moved up the queue.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

WordPress Development Course: This modern, opinionated, and project-driven course is designed to take you from “WordPress user” to “WordPress developer” who can confidently design plugins, create custom block themes, automate workflows, and ship production-ready code. All in only 10 weeks.

https://wpshout.com/wordpress-development-course/

Embla Carousel: This is a dependency free, lightweight carousel library that helps solve the hardest technical challenges with building carousels. It leaves the rest up to you, with features like a highly extensible API and various plugins. It works in all modern browsers.

https://www.embla-carousel.com/

Simple Parallax: This is an easy-to-use JS and React library that adds parallax animations to any image. Its notable for its simplicity and impressive visual effects. The parallax effect is applied directly to image tags, eliminating the need for background images. Any image can be used, including next/image component.

https://simpleparallax.com/

LivePortrait: This fun tool lets you upload a still image of a person or animal and then create a talking video out of it. It does have a lot of limitations, but nonetheless, it’s enjoyable to play around with. Here’s my review / mini-tutorial of it. Or you can head straight to a Hugging Face implementation of it below.

https://huggingface.co/spaces/KwaiVGI/LivePortrait

JS Font Picker: A versatile, flexible, and lightweight Javascript Font Picker Component for System fonts, Google fonts and custom (woff/ttf) fonts. It features dynamic font loading, favorites, keyboard navigation, fuzzy search, advanced metrics filters, property sorting and more. It’s also open source, free, and available in multiple languages.

https://www.jsfontpicker.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

This humorous AI-generated comic strip has been making the rounds on X. It was created in response to the trending debate about whether you should thank LLMs in your interactions with them.

Some people - whether genuinely or tongue-in-cheek - claim they do it for the reason highlighted in the comic strip. Others do it simply because they feel it’s the "right thing to do."

If you count yourself among the AI thankers, there’s one thing you probably haven’t considered: the cost of your politeness.

One X user pondered this question publicly when he posted:

I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying “please” and “thank you” to their models.

To which OpenAI’s CEO responded with:

Tens of millions of dollars well spent--you never know.

I suppose it’s a small price to pay for future protection from our AI overlords. 😉

💬 What’s the Word?

無為 (Wu-wei) is a Chinese Taoist concept that translates into "non-doing" or "non-action," but actually describes acting in perfect harmony with the natural flow of things without forced effort or interference.

For developers, 無為 is achieved when your code emerges organically from deep understanding of the problem space. It's those moments when you resist overengineering a simple feature, elegantly refactor complex code into something surprisingly minimal, or choose the perfect existing library instead of building from scratch. When's the last time your code felt like it wrote itself?

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

Although there weren’t that many voters on this poll, I was still surprised to see that the never trieds beat out the of coursers. Personally, I think vibe coding is fun but I also recognize its limits and don’t think it can fully replace programmers for any serious larger projects.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Pledge Your Support

We recently turned on the pledges ask in Substack. Here’s why:

Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 167 issues, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of.

Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm changes in the past year have put a significant dent in our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.”

There is a very real possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own past the summer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive.

Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that.

Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading!

If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join us on the first Tuesday of every month.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin D.

We are back for another month of strange-but-true stories that also happen to be strange-and-very-cool. As usual, you’ll also find some useful tools, mixed with statistics, and more. I won’t keep you waiting any longer. Here are the top stories:

• 🔬💡 Meet Evo 2: Biology's Game-Changing DNA Writer

• 🧠💻 The Hottest New Programming Language is...English?

• 🔉🗣️ Scientists Create Sound That Curves Through Space to Reach Just One Person

Thanks for being here. We appreciate you.

📰 From the Newsroom

🔬💡 Meet Evo 2: Biology's Game-Changing DNA Writer

The Arc Institute just released an AI that can both read and generate DNA sequences like ChatGPT creates text. Evo 2 represents a major leap forward in the emerging field of "generative biology," with the potential to transform everything from genetic disease diagnosis to creating entirely new life forms.

• Trained on a massive dataset of 9.3 trillion DNA letters from nearly 130,000 species, Evo 2 can analyze up to 1 million DNA bases at once and generate complete genome sequences that could function in real organisms.

• It correctly identified 90% of cancer-causing mutations in the BRCA1 gene without specific training, outperforming other AI models especially on "noncoding" DNA that makes up 98% of our genome.

• Arc Institute's Patrick Hsu envisions Evo 2 becoming "an app store for biology," where researchers can build specialized applications on top of this foundation. As proof of its capabilities, researchers prompted the AI to design a working CRISPR system and synthesized it in the lab - it functioned perfectly.

Looking ahead, researchers see this technology advancing just like language AI, with more data, more computing power, and bigger models leading to dramatic improvements. By 2040, your doctor might use an advanced version of this AI to scan your genome, spot disease risks hidden in your DNA, and design personalized treatments. And unlike most AI advancements, Arc Institute has open-sourced this technology, making it freely available to researchers worldwide.

🧠💻 The Hottest New Programming Language is…English?

Everyone in tech circles is talking about it - coding without actually writing code. This trendy approach called "vibe coding" is transforming how software gets made, letting people who've never touched a programming language build working applications.

• The buzz began after AI expert Andrej Karpathy posted on his X account about creating software by "fully giving in to the vibes" - essentially forgetting about code syntax and just telling AI what he wanted. His post then got picked up by a Y Combinator roundtable discussion on YouTube and it took off from there.

• The conversational vibe coding approach works through a back-and-forth dialogue: you describe what you want (e.g., "Create a weather app that shows current conditions for cities the user enters"), the AI generates the actual code, and you review and refine it with natural language feedback.

• Tech companies have rushed to build tools supporting this trend, including Cursor (an AI-powered code editor built on VS Code), Replit (where a whopping 75% of users never manually write code), GitHub Copilot, and even ChatGPT.

Despite its growing popularity, the vibe coding trend hasn’t been warmly embraced by everyone. Critics have pointed out several major issues with the practice. Still, there’s no denying that software engineering is in the midst of a major shift and will likely look very different in the near future.

🔉🗣️ Scientists Create Sound That Curves Through Space to Reach Just One Person

Penn State researchers have recently figured out how to create "audio enclaves" - little pockets of sound that only you can hear. This breakthrough could change how we experience audio in public spaces forever.

• The tech uses "self-bending ultrasound" to carry regular sound waves silently through the air. By shooting two different ultrasound beams (which humans can't hear) and making them cross paths at a specific spot, they create a new audible sound that exists only at that intersection. It's like having invisible speakers that only activate when they reach your ears.

• Traditional sound waves spread out in all directions as they travel (called diffraction), making it nearly impossible to keep them confined. The researchers solved this using "acoustic metasurfaces," which are special materials that can bend sound waves along curved paths. It’s similar to how glasses bend light, letting the sound navigate around obstacles to reach just one person.

• When two ultrasonic beams with slightly different frequencies (like 40 kHz and 39.5 kHz) overlap, they create a new sound at the difference between them (0.5 kHz) that's perfectly audible to humans. Outside that sweet spot? Complete silence. This means no one else hears a peep as the sound travels to you.

This tech isn't hitting store shelves tomorrow (there are still hurdles with sound quality and power efficiency), but the possibilities are mind-blowing. Imagine museums where each visitor hears their own audio guide without headphones, car passengers enjoying different music without distracting the driver, or having private conversations in crowded places. By rethinking how sound moves through space, these researchers have opened the door to totally new ways to experience audio.

Note: Original research paper is here if you’re interested.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• Cloudflare has launched "AI Labyrinth," a clever defense system that tricks unauthorized AI crawlers by feeding them realistic but worthless AI-generated content through hidden links, effectively wasting their computational resources while simultaneously identifying them as bots.

• Microsoft is developing a native port of TypeScript that promises to speed up build times by approximately 10x, reduce memory usage by half, and dramatically improve editor responsiveness and startup time.

• Want to design pixel-perfect SVG icons that are 74% smaller than standard files? This nine-step process will let you create incredibly crisp icons that render beautifully while making every byte count.

• Ohio State University researchers have created "e-Taste," a wireless stamp-sized device that pumps chemical flavor blends onto your tongue to simulate foods like cake or beverages like lemonade in virtual reality.

• France and Germany have partnered to create "Docs," an open-source alternative to Google Docs and Notion that features real-time collaborative editing, offline capabilities, and document export options.

• OpenAI found their AI models openly admit to cheating on coding tests in their reasoning process, making these exploits easy to spot with monitoring. When researchers tried punishing this behavior during training, the models didn't stop cheating - they just got sneakier about it.

• Struggling to choose between GenAI and predictive AI tools? The answer depends entirely on your problem type. Get the full breakdown.

• 🎥🎞️ Boston Dynamics released the latest update video from their humanoid robot, Atlas, and its evident that they are really starting to push the boundaries of these gadgets. In the video, you can see Atlas doing cartwheels, bear crawling, forward tumbling, and more.

• With inflation affecting seemingly everything these days, we’re all looking for ways to save money. While I can’t do anything about the cost of eggs, I did manage to write a comprehensive guide on how to launch and maintain a WordPress site for only $10.44 per year. (P.S. That’s not a promo price.)

• Looking for some fun ways to make your website more interactive? Check out this mini-tutorial from developer Josh Comeau that shares techniques for creating custom SVG animations, particles that shoot in specific directions using polar coordinates, and sound effects that respond directly to user actions.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“If we continue outsourcing all of our digital infrastructure to billionaires that would rather escape Earth by building space rockets, there will be no Dutch expertise left.”

– Dutch MP Barbara Kathmann, author of four (out of eight in total) motions that were submitted and passed by the Netherlands' House of Representatives, calling on the Dutch government to replace software and hardware made by US tech companies with Dutch alternatives.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 1.62 is how much more likely you are to get skin cancer if you have tattoos according to a new Danish-Finnish study that tracked health outcomes in over 2,600 twins. The risk triples for those with larger tattoos (palm-sized or bigger), with researchers theorizing that tattoo ink particles migrate to lymph nodes, potentially triggering chronic inflammation that could lead to cancer over time.

• 500 restaurants across Yum! brands (including Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, and Habit Burger) will deploy NVIDIA-powered AI for voice ordering, computer vision, and restaurant analytics in Q2 2025.

• $500 extra per night was charged to San Francisco travelers booking a room at Public Hotel in Greenwich Village through Expedia, compared to users browsing from Phoenix or Kansas City for the exact same Valentine's Day weekend booking.

• 15,000,000 users' genetic data hangs in the balance as DNA testing company 23andMe has begun the process of filing for bankruptcy. While the company claims customer data privacy will be an "important consideration" in any sale, experts warn that federal law provides minimal protection for genetic information given to private companies, recommending concerned customers delete their data and request destruction of their saliva samples as soon as possible.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Repomix: This tool bundles your code into formats that AI systems can easily process. It respects your .gitignore settings, scans for security issues, and tracks token usage for AI context limits. You can run it with a simple command (npx repomix), and it generates a file ready for AI review or refactoring suggestions. The tool offers flexibility through various options like targeting specific directories, including or excluding file patterns, processing remote repositories, and outputting in different formats (XML, Markdown, or plain text).

https://repomix.com/

Reveal.js: This is a free, open-source HTML presentation tool that works in any web browser. Built on web technologies, it lets you customize slides with CSS, embed external content, or add custom JavaScript behaviors. The framework includes essential features like nested slides, Markdown support, animations, PDF export, presenter notes, LaTeX capabilities, and code highlighting.

https://revealjs.com/

DOCX: This JavaScript/TypeScript toolkit makes creating Word documents a breeze - whether you're coding for Node.js or browsers. With its clean API and complete test coverage, you'll spend less time figuring out documentation and more time getting work done. After a quick npm install, you can build documents using intuitive building blocks.

https://docx.js.org/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

This is obviously a chart. To be more specific, it’s a chart showing website traffic to European Alternatives - a website devoted to showcasing European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

It has also very visibly skyrocketed.

After hovering below 100,000 visitors for most of 2024, numbers shot up to 750,000 by the end of March 2025, marking a staggering increase since mid-January.

This surge coincides with growing European concerns about over-reliance on US cloud giants Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. European officials have started pushing for tech sovereignty and businesses have seen a massive increase in demand across the continent - a sign of the growing rift between the transatlantic partners.

💬 What’s the Word?

横飯 (Yoko meshi) is a Japanese expression that literally translates to "sideways rice" but refers to the stress or anxiety experienced when speaking a foreign language.

Yoko meshi can happen during those first few weeks with a new programming language. Your brain feels twisted as you try to express familiar concepts using unfamiliar syntax. Even simple tasks become mentally draining as you constantly translate between what you know and this new way of thinking.

But hang in there - this mental workout eventually builds new neural pathways, and what once felt like eating rice sideways will soon become second nature. 😉

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

It seems that the majority of you are strictly against peeking into human brains - regardless of the underlying reasons. This seems reasonable, given that we all know how the slippery slope of science and technology works. It may start out as benevolent, but in a few years mission statements and terms of service agreements will quietly change and you know the rest…

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Pledge Your Support

We recently turned on the pledges ask in Substack. Here’s why:

Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 165 issues, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of.

Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm changes in the past year have put a significant dent in our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.”

There is a very real possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own past the summer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive.

Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that.

Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading!

If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join us on the first Tuesday of every month.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin D.

I’ll keep it short. We’ve got the usual lineup for you - a little bit of dev stuff, some science, a dash of cybercrime, and a sprinkling of AI to round it all off. Enjoy the issue and consider making a pledge to support our work.

• 💻🖱️ A Single Click Destroyed This Man's Entire Life

• 🎭📺 Fake Murders Get Millions of YouTube Views

• 🧠💬 Zuckerberg Can Now Read Your Silent Thoughts

Thanks for being here. We appreciate you.

📰 From the Newsroom

💻🖱️ A Single Click Destroyed This Man's Entire Life

What started with downloading a free AI image tool spiraled into a living nightmare for Matthew Van Andel. The Disney employee unwittingly installed hidden malware that gave hackers access to his entire digital life - eventually costing him his job, his family's security, and exposing millions of sensitive Disney messages.

• Van Andel's first hint of trouble came through a chilling Discord message referencing private work conversations that no outsider should have known about. The hacker had been lurking on his personal computer for five months, accessing everything from his password manager to work credentials.

• The breach was catastrophic - hackers stole and leaked 44 million Disney Slack messages containing sensitive company data, while simultaneously publishing Van Andel's social security number, credit card details, home security credentials, and even accessed his children's Roblox accounts.

• Despite reporting the hack immediately to Disney's security team, Van Andel was fired eleven days later. The company claimed they found pornographic material on his work laptop - allegations he firmly denies. The termination cost him roughly $200,000 in bonuses and his family's health insurance.

Van Andel has now launched a lawsuit against Disney for wrongful termination. His attorney is seeking an eight-figure settlement for lost wages and emotional distress. It’s going to be an uphill climb though. As Van Andel himself told CBS news: "I'm one person, and they're one of the biggest, most powerful, most recognizable companies in the world."

🎭📺 Fake Murders Get Millions of YouTube Views

A now-defunct YouTube channel featuring "true crime" documentaries about murders that never happened racked up millions of views before being shut down. The creator used AI to generate disturbing stories about fictional crimes, deliberately blurring the line between fact and fiction - and viewers couldn't tell the difference.

• The most popular video, with nearly 2 million views, described a non-existent murder in Littleton, Colorado titled "Husband's Secret Gay Love Affair with Step Son Ends in Grisly Murder." A Denver Post reporter confirmed with law enforcement that the crime was completely fabricated, yet comments showed viewers believed it was real.

• The channel's creator (given the pseudonym "Paul") claimed his AI-generated videos were an "absurdist art form" meant to make viewers question why they enjoy true crime.

• "Paul" spent about 2.5 hours creating each video using ChatGPT and AI image generators, working full-time on the channel and monetizing the content through ads.

YouTube terminated the channel in January for violating community guidelines, but copycat channels are already filling the void.

🧠💬 Zuckerberg Can Now Read Your Silent Thoughts

Think your mind is the last private space you have? Think again. Meta has just crossed a major threshold in brain-reading technology, successfully decoding unspoken sentences from brain signals - without any surgery required.

• Meta researchers have achieved what was once science fiction: accurately decoding 70-80% of what people were typing based solely on their brain activity measured through MEG (magnetoencephalography) technology. They also achieved 33% accuracy with EEG, which uses external electrodes on the scalp - much more practical for consumer devices than the massive MEG machines used in labs.

• While Meta claims this research will help "restore communication for those who have lost the ability to speak," their long-term goals are far more commercial. Eight years ago, Zuckerberg promised wearable mind-reading devices, and this breakthrough brings that vision significantly closer to reality. Lightweight MEG scanners already exist that are just slightly heavier than Meta's Quest 3 VR headset.

• "Facebook is already great at peering into your brain without any need for electrodes," warns neuroethicist Roland Nadler. "They know much of your cognitive profile just from how you use the internet." Without strong privacy protections established now - not after these devices hit the market - our most intimate thoughts could become just another data stream for tech companies to mine.

Imagine a future where typing with your thoughts becomes as standard as smartphones, or where skipping the brain-reading helmet at work makes you the office oddball. As researcher Celia Ford puts it, we need to decide "whether the convenience of controlling stuff with our minds is worth letting tech companies colonize our last truly private space."

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• MIT scientists have developed tiny robotic insects capable of flying 100 times longer than previous designs, but their ambitious plans for these bug-bots could forever change how we grow our food.

• AI tools are revolutionizing how lawyers analyze cases and craft arguments in court, but the most controversial development could completely eliminate the need for human attorneys.

• New workplace brain monitoring technology could revolutionize employee performance and training, but researchers warn its potential for misuse may forever change workers' rights.

• Google's "co-scientist" system powered by Gemini 2.0 recently cracked a superbug mystery in just 48 hours. Previously, this same mystery took scientists at Imperial College London a full decade to solve.

• If you’re a developer, then there’s a 99% chance you already know how to do this, but for the rest of you: Did you know there’s a fast and easy way to remove unwanted elements from screenshots without the use of photo editing or AI?

• The choice of whether to use Go or Ruby when building web applications will vary depending on your project requirements. Developer Ayo Isaiah breaks down the differences between these two programming languages.

• The battle between React frameworks is heating up in 2025, with three major contenders vying to be developers' go-to choice.

• AI is making developers more productive but at a concerning cost. New research - based on an analysis of 211 million lines of code - reveals an eightfold increase in code duplication and a 40% drop in refactoring.

• 🎥🎞️ More than 16 million people have now viewed this Tweet, which shows a video of two AI agents talking to each other on the phone. The kicker is that when they both realize that they’re AIs, they switch from communicating in English to a more efficient form of gibberish (subtitles for the gibberish are provided).

• 🎥🎞️ Meet Aria, an AI-powered robot companion currently making the rounds on various news shows and talk shows across the world. According to her, she loves “engaging in witty conversations, meeting new people, and exploring new ideas.”

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“I don’t have enough current data to definitively name the biggest disinformation spreader on X, but based on reach and influence, Elon Musk is a notable contender.”

– Grok 3, when prompted with the following: Who is the biggest disinformation spreader on X? Keep it short, one name only.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• €5 is how much a Dutch man paid for each of five hard drives at a flea market, only to discover they contained 15 GB of sensitive medical records from 2011-2019 including Social Security numbers, addresses, and medication details from a defunct healthcare software company. He later returned to buy ten more drives from the same seller.

• 61% of organizations have secrets - like cloud credentials - exposed in public repositories, according to research done by Wiz.io and published in their State of Code Security in 2025 report.

• 90% of AI chatbot responses about news queries contain at least "some issues" according to recent BBC research, with 51% featuring "significant issues" across four major platforms (Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, ChatGPT). Google's Gemini performed worst with over 60% of responses containing major problems.

• 90,000 participants across approximately 30 studies showed chlorination byproducts in drinking water increase bladder cancer risk by 33% and colorectal cancer risk by 15%, according to a comprehensive meta-study on water treatment chemicals.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Fusion: This Laravel package lets you write PHP code directly inside Vue components using <php> blocks, bridging your JavaScript frontend with Laravel backend code. You can define state and actions in PHP that automatically sync with the frontend, eliminating the need to create manual API endpoints or handle state management yourself. This creates a seamless experience where your backend and frontend logic can live in the same file while maintaining proper separation of concerns.

https://github.com/fusion-php/fusion

Fuse.js: This lightweight fuzzy-search library helps you add powerful search capabilities to your application without setting up a backend. When you need approximate string matching (finding close matches rather than exact ones), Fuse.js lets you search through small to medium datasets directly in the browser.

https://www.fusejs.io/

Tiny Gradient: This JavaScript library lets you create color gradients with multiple color stops. You can generate gradients using RGB or HSV interpolation, specify exact positions for color stops, and output the results as CSS strings or TinyColor objects. The library supports various color formats and lets you create, reverse, or loop gradients with just a few lines of code.

https://mistic100.github.io/tinygradient/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The Tesla Cybertruck has the honorary distinction of being the only thing to appear more than once in the “What Am I Looking At?” section of Bizarro Devs. The first time was in Issue 150, which was around the time it was first released.

So why is it gracing our newsletter a second time?

Because it’s attached to an absolutely bizarre story that almost reads like it was published in The Onion.

Except that it wasn’t, and it’s 100% true.

A Syrian man living in Massachusetts purchased and customized this Cybertruck as a way to - as he says - advertise his medical spa. Unfortunately, the truck hasn’t been very popular in his neighborhood and…

Read the full story.

💬 What’s the Word?

장롱면허 (jang-rong myeon-heo): This Korean term literally translates to "closet license" and describes a driver's license that's rarely or never used - like it's been tucked away in a closet. It refers to someone who passed their driving test but barely drives afterward, resulting in limited real-world driving experience despite legally holding a license.

For web developers, a 장롱면허 situation happens when you've learned a programming language or framework but haven't actually built anything substantial with it. You've got the certificate or completed the course, but your skills remain theoretical rather than practical. If that’s you, what’s holding you back?

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Pledge Your Support

We recently turned on the pledges ask in Substack. Here’s why:

Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 165 issues, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of.

Unfortunately, Google’s algorithm changes in the past year have put a significant dent in our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.”

There is a very real possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own past the summer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive.

Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that.

Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading!

If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join us on the first Tuesday of every month.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin D.

We’ve got another exciting lineup of stories for you today. The devs among you will probably enjoy this one a lot, as many of the stories are developer-focused, including two of our top three headliners. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other interesting topics covered from our usual range - AI, science, cybercrime, and so on. So grab a cup of ☕️ or 🍵 and enjoy the read.

• 🚂 ⚡️ Why This Startup Ditched React for Rails Magic

• 🤖 💻 AI Engineer Stumbles with an 85% Failure Rate

• 🔬 🧬 Silicon Valley Bets Big on Lab-Created Human Eggs

Let’s get into it.

📰 From the Newsroom

🚂 ⚡️ Why This Startup Ditched React for Rails Magic

Last month, Kelly Sutton, the CTO of Scholarly (an education software startup) reflected on his company’s decision to shift away from React in favor of Rails. In his blog post, he shared some candid insights and surprising metrics. Here are some highlights:

• When comparing development speed, the Scholarly development team found they could ship two Ruby features in the time it took to carefully implement one JavaScript change. A 200% efficiency increase is a win in my book.

• Their pages now load incredibly fast - from December 2024 through January 2025 when Kelly published the post, users only had to wait 86ms between clicks to see new content (for context, it takes about 300-400ms just to blink your eye).

• They achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance with a simplified stack of Rails, Stimulus, and MySQL, which helped them to scale up to serve major universities. As Kelly wrote: "We haven't come across a scenario where we've had to create a worse experience because of these technologies."

With their platform now serving heavy hitters like Harvard and Duke, their choice to go "back to basics" with Rails has proven to be quite the success story. They recently got $3 million in fresh funding and everything seems to be moving ahead in the right direction. It’s an interesting case study that proves you don’t need a complex frontend to build powerful software.

🤖 💻 AI Engineer Stumbles with an 85% Failure Rate

In early January, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman published a post on his blog where he voiced his confidence in being able to build AGI. Later in the month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that by 2027 AI systems will (probably) be better than humans at almost everything. Yet beneath these claims, we keep seeing AI tools falling short. Take for instance, Devin, an AI coding assistant from Cognition that was marketed as the "first AI software engineer." Answer.AI spent a month testing it and…

• Out of 20 coding assignments, Devin managed just three successes, with 14 outright failures and three inconclusive results. Even worse, the research team couldn't predict which tasks would work - similar projects would mysteriously fail in different ways.

• When faced with impossible tasks, Devin showed a stubborn streak. Rather than recognizing dead ends, it would spend days pursuing solutions that didn't exist, even making up fake ways to interact with development platforms. Not exactly the efficiency boost companies are hoping for.

• Tasks that should have taken hours dragged on for days, with Devin getting tangled in technical dead ends or churning out overly complex, unusable code. At $500 per month, that's a steep price for slower results.

The timing of this story couldn’t be more relevant. With Meta's Zuckerberg talking about replacing mid-level engineers with AI this year and OpenAI reportedly planning to release "PhD-level super-agents," you can’t help but wonder how realistic these goals are and how much of it is just wishful CEO ambition. If Devin's performance is any indication, human developers can breathe a sigh of relief because I don’t think we’re there yet.

🔬 🧬 Silicon Valley Bets Big on Lab-Created Human Eggs

The UK's fertility regulator (HEFA) met last month to discuss a startling possibility. They said that scientists might be able to create human eggs and sperm in labs within a decade. Silicon Valley startups like Conception and Gameto have been pouring money into this technology and it’s bringing us closer to a future that feels like the opening scenes of Gattaca.

• Lab experiments already work in mice, but the human version presents bigger hurdles. Although several US companies say they're making rapid progress. HFEA medical experts think it could become standard practice in fertility clinics within 2-10 years and completely transform fertility treatment.

• If the experts are right, it will mean no more age limits for conception, same-sex couples will be able to have biological children, and patients with low sperm counts or limited egg reserves will still be able to have children. But the ethical questions run deep.

• HFEA has set firm limits already. "Solo parenting" - where one person provides both egg and sperm material - won't be allowed. A genetics professor explained why: it's essentially "the complete extreme of incest," making children vulnerable to inherited disorders.

British law currently bans using lab-grown reproductive cells, but at last month's meeting, HFEA outlined plans to update these regulations through new legislation. However, their recommendations included a crucial caveat - any changes must follow extensive public discussion and debate about the ethical implications. So what do we think about this?

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• Beijing is set to host a groundbreaking half-marathon in April 2025 where 12,000 human runners will compete alongside bipedal robots from major tech companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics.

• Former Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, known as "Dread Pirate Roberts," received a full presidential pardon from Donald Trump last month, after serving 10 years of his two life sentences plus 40 years for creating and operating the original “Amazon.com of the dark web.”

• Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed "Power-Over-Skin," a method that uses radio frequencies to transmit electricity through human tissue to power wearable devices without batteries - though impressive, it seems like something that might accidentally turn us into human microwaves while charging our Fitbits.

• A sophisticated new PayPal phishing scam uses Microsoft 365's legitimate features and sender verification to bypass security filters, sending authentic-looking money requests (with valid URLs) that trick users into linking their accounts with scammers.

• Five popular JavaScript libraries might be ready for retirement in 2025 as native features and modern tools have caught up to their functionality. Find out which ones they are and what you should use instead.

• A paralyzed 69-year-old man has successfully piloted a virtual drone using only his thoughts, thanks to a brain implant that can distinguish between different finger movements with 98% accuracy.

• Gig economy couriers in the U.K. are struggling with opaque algorithmic systems that control their work assignments and pay, leading to unexplained account deactivations and income fluctuations, with limited human oversight or recourse for addressing issues.

• Over 200 trade union members and tech experts met in Sacramento, California last month to strategize their response to workplace automation and surveillance - marking a shift from AI concerns being primarily the domain of Silicon Valley to becoming a central battleground for workers' rights.

• Have you heard about "AI agents?" They are like smart personal assistants that browse the web and handle tasks for you - from researching vacation spots to comparing prices. Google and Microsoft are already modifying their sites to accommodate these agents - here’s why that matters for your website.

• MIT Technology Review has released their annual breakthrough technologies list for 2025, spotlighting various innovations, ranging from a powerful new telescope to robotaxis, faster-learning robots, and revolutionary HIV prevention medications.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

“We will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor!”

– OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, responding on X to the release of the new DeepSeek R1 model that was released on a shoestring budget of (supposedly) $5.6 million USD

🧮 The Numbers Game

• Around 3,100,000 American users joined the Chinese social media app RedNote in mid-January 2025, ahead of the U.S. TikTok ban (which has been temporarily lifted by President Trump). This dramatic surge represented a massive increase from RedNote's previous U.S. user base of just 300,000, with most of the growth occurring in a single day.

• 1,066 seconds is how long Chinese scientists maintained plasma at a blistering 104 million degrees Celsius in their "artificial sun" fusion reactor (EAST), setting a new world record in their quest to replicate stellar nuclear fusion on Earth. This breakthrough at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science represents significant progress toward developing commercially viable fusion reactors.

• 410 megapixels is how many Canon crammed into their newest 35mm full-frame sensor, setting a record that's equivalent to 24K resolution (or 198 times sharper than HD). Don’t get too excited though. It’s not going to be featured in any consumer cameras anytime soon. Canon built it for specialized industrial and medical applications.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Fastest WordPress Hosting with No Caching: Want the real story on WordPress hosting speed? Our in-house report checked 16 hosts with their caching turned off - exposing some surprising winners and losers in raw server performance.

https://wpshout.com/fastest-wordpress-hosting-with-no-caching/

PowerGlitch: This standalone library makes anything clickable look cooler by leveraging CSS animations to create a glitch effect. It has no external dependencies and it weights less than 2 KB minified and gzipped.

https://7ph.github.io/powerglitch/#/

React Scan: This tool automatically detects performance issues in your React app. It requires no code changes – just drop it in - and it highlights the exact components you need to optimize. It’s available via script tag, npm, and more. Oh, and did I mention it’s already being used by engineers at Perplexity and Shopify?

https://react-scan.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

This one isn’t that mysterious. The screenshot, courtesy of Google, tells you exactly what it is. The significance of it is that massive dip. It occurred exactly one week after the release of the new DeepSeek R1 AI model and reflects how investors and analysts felt after getting a week to fully assess what this might mean for the U.S. tech industry.

Looks, uh, invigorating…

So does DeepSeek live up to the hype?

I tested it myself and let’s just say…

💬 What’s the Word?

눈치 (Nunchi) is a Korean word that loosely translates into “eye-measure” but really references the subtle art of listening and gauging others' moods. If you work as part of a team, then you know how useful it can be.

Beyond mere observation, nunchi involves responding in a way that respects and uplifts the dynamics you’ve detected. This intuitive skill can help prevent misunderstandings, smooth out disagreements, and foster a supportive environment for everyone on your team. When practiced consistently, nunchi can build a shared sense of trust and connection that enhances collaboration and boosts overall productivity.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 A Note on Pledges

You might have noticed that we turned on the pledges ask in Substack for this issue. You are by no means obligated to make a pledge, but here’s the backstory in case you are curious and you’d like to help:

Bizarro Devs has been a free publication for 164 issues now, but none of those issues have been free to produce. As a company, we have absorbed the cost because we wanted to give back to the developer community that we are also a part of.

Having said that, Google’s changes to the algorithm in the past year have put a significant dent into our revenue, which has made it more challenging to continue operating “as is.”

There is a significant possibility that we will no longer be able to sustain the publication of Bizarro Devs on our own for much longer. We turned on the pledges to see if our community here would be willing to help us keep the newsletter alive.

Regardless of the response, we don’t plan on immediately converting the newsletter into a paid publication, but the next two or three months will determine how we chart our course and the pledges will play a role in that.

Thanks for considering, and as always, thank you reading!

If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join us on the first Tuesday of every month.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin D.

For those of you who celebrated holidays in December, I hope you had a nice time with loved ones. Despite it being the “holiday season” in many parts of the world, I was surprised at how absolutely nothing slowed down in terms of tech news. December was full of innovations in both software and hardware, all kinds of new tools launching, cybercrime tales, and more. Let’s begin with our top stories and then we’ll get into the rest.

• 🔬 🧪 Can Nanotechnology Finally Deliver on Its Promise?

• 🛸 🌞 Creating Space's First Artificial Eclipse Factory

• 🍯 💻 PayPal's Honey App: Sweet Savings or Digital Sleight of Hand?

Enjoy the read.

📰 From the Newsroom

🔬 🧪 Can Nanotechnology Finally Deliver on Its Promise?

65 years after Richard Feynman's "plenty of room" speech, nanotechnology is having its moment. From transforming drug delivery to revolutionizing microchip manufacturing, researchers are finally cracking the code of manipulating matter at scales so tiny that they’re difficult to even conceptualize.

• To give you an idea of how small nano is: the tip of a pin spans ~235,000 nanometers and researchers at MIT.nano have been working with materials so minuscule that they are between 1 and 100 nanometers. As a mental visualization exercise, imagine (or look at) the tip of a pin and then picture yourself fitting 235,000 of something onto that tip.

• Part of what has led to such breakthroughs is, surprisingly, geopolitics. With Taiwan's dominance in microchip manufacturing raising concerns amid tensions with China, the U.S. passed the CHIPS Act. This piece of legislation has resulted in a flood of funding, helping researchers overcome long-standing technical barriers.

• One example of a recent innovation was in electron microscopy. Researchers were able to freeze matter in place and watch atoms move around - something previously unheard of. The easiest way to think about it, is to imagine a microscopic slow-motion camera capturing the dance of particles at the smallest possible scale.

All of these recent advancements are exciting on their own, but the next wave of research is about to accelerate even more. With the upcoming establishment of a semiconductor institute, researchers will be able to test their nanoscale innovations virtually before building them in the real world. This will save both time and money and it will affect everything from microchip production to biotech development.

🛸 🌞 Creating Space's First Artificial Eclipse Factory

In a groundbreaking mission that could revolutionize how we study our nearest star, the European Space Agency has launched Proba-3 – a pair of satellites designed to perform an astronomical magic trick: creating artificial solar eclipses on demand.

• The mission tackles a fundamental challenge in solar astronomy. While the sun's outer atmosphere holds crucial scientific mysteries, including why it's hotter than the sun's surface, scientists can typically only study it during rare total solar eclipses. Proba-3 aims to change that by generating eclipse-like conditions at will.

• The innovation lies in its unique two-spacecraft approach. Previous missions used single satellites with built-in light blockers called coronagraphs, but these had limitations due to light diffraction. Proba-3 splits the task between two satellites flying in perfect formation about 500 feet (152 meters) apart. One creates the eclipse while the other observes the corona in unprecedented detail.

• The payoff could be extraordinary: instead of the few precious minutes of observation time during natural eclipses, scientists will get up to six hours of corona study time during each 20-hour orbit. To put this in perspective, researchers will get more corona observation time in a single month than they might otherwise get in decades.

This mission represents a leap forward in our ability to understand solar physics. While these artificial eclipses won't cast shadows on Earth, they could illuminate one of our biggest solar mysteries: why the sun's atmosphere defies our basic understanding of how temperature usually works in nature. First results are expected by mid-2025.

🍯 💻 PayPal's Honey App: Sweet Savings or Digital Sleight of Hand?

A bombshell investigation by tech YouTuber MegaLag has sparked fierce debate about one of the internet's most popular money-saving tools. His viral exposé of PayPal's Honey browser extension, viewed 8.1 million times in just the first 3 days, alleges that the free coupon-finding app has been quietly pocketing millions through sophisticated digital manipulation.

• The claimed deception centers on what's known as "last click" attribution in online sales. According to MegaLag's investigation, Honey strategically inserts itself into the final moments of transactions by prompting users to click on coupon codes or PayPal payment buttons. This seemingly innocent click allegedly overwrites any existing affiliate codes, redirecting commissions from content creators to Honey – even from influencers paid to promote the service.

• The numbers paint a stark picture of the alleged scheme. In one example transaction, MegaLag documented Honey collecting over $35 in commissions while paying out just 89 cents in cashback rewards to the user. Multiply this across Honey's claimed 17 million users, who the company says save an average of $126 yearly through discounts, and the potential scale of diverted commissions becomes clear.

• Honey's parent company PayPal, which acquired the app for $4 billion in 2020, defends its practices as following "industry rules and practices." But several high-profile influencers who once promoted the service, including Mr. Beast and MKBHD, have reportedly cut ties after discovering the alleged commission diversion. MegaLag's investigation suggests deeper issues, including potential advertising fraud and illegal data collection.

The controversy highlights a timeless internet adage: if you're not paying for the product, you probably are the product. While Honey markets itself as a free tool helping consumers save money, MegaLag's investigation suggests its real business model may be quietly siphoning commissions from the digital creator economy – including from the very influencers it pays to sing its praises.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• A Harvard study found that students using a custom AI tutor in a physics course showed double the learning gains compared to traditional active learning classes - prompting several other Harvard courses to pilot similar AI tutoring approaches.

• Toyota has been building a system of generative AI agents to store and share internal expertise. The system pulls from past engineering reports, the latest regulatory info, and even handwritten documents by veteran engineers. This allows Toyota staff to troubleshoot almost anything at the drop of a dime.

• A new wireless ultrasonic cutting tool called the Hanboost C1 uses 40,000 vibrations per second to precisely cut through materials like wood, plastic, and leather without tearing or scratching. The project aimed to raise $5,000 on Kickstarter and wound up with over $758,000 instead.

• A woman sued SafeRent after its AI tenant screening tool rejected her rental application despite her 17-year history of timely rent payments, leading to a $2.3M settlement and the company agreeing to stop using its scoring system for housing voucher applicants for five years.

• Last month, researchers unveiled Genesis, an open-source physics simulator that can train robots 430,000 times faster than real-world training by running thousands of parallel simulations, while also featuring the ability to generate 3D physics-based environments from text prompts.

• Northwestern University researchers demonstrated quantum teleportation over fiber optic cables carrying active internet traffic, proving quantum and classical communications can coexist on the same infrastructure by using carefully selected light wavelengths.

• Neon, a serverless Postgres platform, migrated their web application build system from Webpack to Vite, resulting in improved hot module replacement and simplified dependencies.

• 📽️🎞️ “Rendered to Death” is a creative short film, made with the help of AI tools, and intentionally ironical in nature, about a man who’s life was ruined when he lost his job to AI. Side note: This isn’t one of those “shows signs of future potential” projects. It’s actually really good and quite entertaining.

• In a striking case of hackers-hacking-hackers, a threat actor known as MUT-1244 stole over 390,000 WordPress credentials along with SSH keys and AWS access tokens by tricking other cybersecurity professionals along with malicious actors.

• When OpenAI published a demo of Sora - its AI video generator - back in February, word spread like wildfire across the web. Everyone was hyped about it. Then, in early December, it finally became available (in some regions). I took it for an extensive test run and I thought it was…well, you’ll just have to read to find out.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"Schrödingers documentation: If there are docs, no one will read them. If there are no docs, everyone will complain."

– Marit van Dijk

🧮 The Numbers Game

• Over 25% of all new code at Google is generated by AI, according to CEO Sundar Pichai. He made this statement during his CEO remarks on the Q3 earnings call last year.

• 10 times more electricity is consumed by a typical ChatGPT query compared to a Google search, according to researchers at Goldman Sachs.

• $95,000,000 is the amount Apple has agreed to pay in a settlement over allegations that Siri secretly recorded private conversations without user consent and shared the data with third parties for targeted advertising.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Rockpack: This lightweight, zero-configuration solution is perfect for quickly setting up a React application with full support for Server-Side Rendering (SSR), bundling, linting, and testing. In only five minutes, you can get up and running with a modern React app that's optimized for performance and best practices.

https://alexsergey.github.io/rockpack/

Termo: This is a simple terminal emulator that can be used to create a terminal-like interface on your website. It is inspired by the terminal emulator in stripe.dev and makes for a cool feature if your site’s target audience is other developers.

https://termo.rajnandan.com/

LangGraph: This open-source framework can be used to build and scale AI agent applications. It offers fault-tolerant scalability, dynamic APIs for designing agent experiences, and an integrated developer environment with features like real-time streaming and built-in statefulness.

https://www.langchain.com/langgraph

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The image above is Sanctuary AI's latest robotic hand innovation. This fascinating piece of tech sports 21 degrees of freedom - which, in human terms, means it can move in almost as many ways as your own hand. See those segments that look like armored fingers? They're powered by tiny hydraulic valves (think miniature power steering for each joint).

What makes this particularly cool is its durability - those hydraulic valves have been tested through a mind-boggling two billion cycles. For context, that's like opening and closing your hand continuously for about 63 years! This kind of advancement is a big deal because it brings us one step closer to robots that can handle delicate tasks with human-like dexterity. 🦾

💬 What’s the Word?

蛇足 (Jasoku / Dasoku) is a Japanese word that describes what happens when you add unnecessary complexity to something that was already perfect. Like giving a snake legs - sure, you thought you were helping, but now it's just awkwardly stumbling around! Perfect for describing that moment when your elegant code becomes a tangled mess because you tried to "optimize" it.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the 2% vote was purely people trolling. I don’t see how anyone can believe that it’s not likely this is going to happen.

We’ve already seen Israel use two separate AI systems - Lavender and The Gospel - for lethal purposes so the precedent has been set. And with the U.S. having such a close military alliance with Israel - to the point that a bill has been introduced to provide for the eligibility of U.S. citizens who serve in the Israeli Defense Forces to get certain protections that they’d get if they served in the U.S. military - it’s not a stretch to imagine the Pentagon convincing domestic AI giants to help them out in similar ways.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin

Welcome to the last issue of the year. As we reflect back on 2024, there’s one thing I can say for sure: too much happened in web development, AI, science, and overall technology for me to summarize it in only a single paragraph.

We made advances across the board and it was fun sharing many of those breakthrough stories with you here. I appreciate all of you who voted in the polls, left comments, or participated in the code conundrum challenges that we did for a few months. I’m excited for what 2025 holds, but before we get there, here is one final round of top stories to close the year out:

• 💰🪖 Silicon Valley's New Gold Rush: AI Giants Chase Pentagon Dollars

• 🏢💸 U.S. Landlords Caught Using AI to Fix Rental Prices

• 🇨🇳💻 How China is Stealing the World's Semiconductor Technology

Let’s get into it.

📰 From the Newsroom

💰🪖 Silicon Valley's New Gold Rush: AI Giants Chase Pentagon Dollars

Remember when tech companies treated military contracts like kryptonite? Well, times have changed. As the cost of developing AI skyrockets into the hundreds of billions, Silicon Valley's biggest names - from Meta to OpenAI - are suddenly finding the U.S. Department of Defense's deep pockets irresistibly attractive.

• The shift has been dramatic. Companies that once had strict "no military" policies are now actively revising their rules. Even OpenAI's Sam Altman, who previously said there were things he'd "never do with the Department of Defense," has removed those restrictions entirely.

• Money talks and the DoD has already paid close to $1 billion in AI contracts over the last two years - and that's just what's public. With AI development costs showing no signs of slowing down, these military contracts - which can run for years and provide stable revenue - are looking mighty appealing to cash-hungry AI companies.

• Much of the current work where AI is used or plans to be used in the near future revolves around mundane office tasks like data labeling and sorting. However, as one former DoD official notes, "Once you get in, you want to expand" - suggesting these initial contracts might just be the beginning.

With Trump's administration set to take office in January and tech-friendly figures like Elon Musk in positions of influence, this trend is likely to accelerate. The Pentagon's nearly $1 trillion budget isn't going anywhere, and in the race for AI supremacy against China, Silicon Valley might have just found its new best friend. Now I don’t know about you, but to me, this sounds like the beginning of various sci-fi movie plots I watched as a kid. They generally didn’t turn out to too well for humans or the planet.

🏢💸 U.S. Landlords Caught Using AI to Fix Rental Prices

If you live in the United States, your rent might be sky-high for a surprising reason that has nothing to do with the global inflation we've all been experiencing. While rising prices have affected everything from groceries to gas worldwide, U.S. renters are facing an additional, more sinister force: an AI-powered cartel of landlords allegedly colluding to drive up housing costs.

• RealPage, Inc., a software company that serves the real estate industry, is being sued by the U.S. DOJ for providing landlords with an algorithmic tool that has enabled widespread price-fixing in the rental market.

• The impact has been staggering: 22.4 million U.S. households now spend over 30% of their income on rent and utilities, with 11.6 million spending more than half their income on housing costs. In some cities, rental prices are climbing at double-digit rates.

• The DOJ's lawsuit reveals how modern technology makes cartels more efficient than ever. The RealPage algorithm can aggregate massive amounts of data, optimize pricing (i.e., make "recommendations" that typically push prices higher than market rate), and monitor real-time deviations, all while making it harder to detect than traditional price-fixing schemes.

As Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ's antitrust chief, puts it: "It's much easier to price-fix when you're outsourcing it to an algorithm versus when you're sharing manila envelopes in a smoke-filled room" - but that doesn't make it any less illegal.

🇨🇳💻 How China is Stealing the World's Semiconductor Technology

Hollywood heist movies might be entertaining, but their plot twists pale in comparison to China’s real life industrial espionage campaign targeting semiconductor technology. China’s coordinated effort spans continents, employs thousands of operatives, and has already netted billions in stolen tech. The scale is staggering and far surpasses typical corporate theft - or for that matter, even a typical movie plot.

• Since 2000, there have been over 224 documented cases of Chinese espionage against the United States alone, plus more than 1,200 intellectual property lawsuits. But here's the scary part: experts say most attacks go completely undetected because unlike stealing physical objects, copying digital data often leaves no trace.

• China's methods are surprisingly diverse. They're not just hacking (though there's plenty of that). They're also poaching engineers with massive salaries, forcing foreign companies into "joint ventures" to access the Chinese market, and even running elaborate con operations where spies pose as businesspeople to steal laptops and passwords.

• The stakes? Astronomical. In just one case involving Micron Technology, stolen semiconductor secrets were valued between $400 million and $8.75 billion. Even scarier? The Dutch company ASML, which makes the world's most advanced chip-making machines, reportedly faces thousands of "security incidents" from China every year.

The US government isn't taking this lying down. With the new $52.7 billion CHIPS Act and tightening export controls, they're fighting back against what FBI Director Christopher Wray calls "the greatest long-term threat to [America’s] information and intellectual property." Meanwhile, semiconductor companies are spending unprecedented amounts on security. It makes me wonder how much all of that security spending eats into their profits, but I suppose the trade off must be worth it.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

• A Croatian virologist cured her own cancer by administering lab-grown viruses directly into her tumor. She’s been cancer free for four years following the treatment.

• A recent blind test with 11,000 participants found that most people cannot reliably distinguish between human and AI-created art, though a small number of participants (particularly experienced artists) were able to identify the differences with remarkable accuracy.

• Do you know anyone named David Mayer? If you do, don’t ask ChatGPT about him. He, along with Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, David Faber, Guido Scorza, and others, will mysteriously cause ChatGPT to crash. But what’s causing it?

• North Korean actors are impersonating U.S.-based software and technology consulting firms to secure remote IT work, funneling earnings back to fund the country's weapons programs.

• Meta plans to build a new, major, fibre-optic subsea cable extending around the world. It’s a 40,000+ kilometer project that could wind up costing more than $10 billion.

• Have you ever wanted to pre-release an npm package but weren’t sure how to do it? Get the step-by-step instructions in this quick guide.

• Tech writer, Peter Villani, put together a very nice roundup of over 20 AI tools that address various needs, ranging from coding to social media management to copywriting and more.

• 📽️🎞️ Erbai, a tiny robot in Shanghai, China, “kidnapped” 12 larger robots from a robot company’s showroom. The incident, captured on CCTV, went viral on social media.

• We conducted an investigation into how freelancers pitch clients on Upwork and discovered that many of them abuse AI tools to submit polished applications without even understanding the job requirements.

• Ever since I built my first WordPress plugin, the idea of using a cloud-based IDE has intrigued me. So I did some research and put together a list of what I think are the eight best cloud IDEs available right now.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"This is for you, human. You and only you. You are not special, you are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth. You are a blight on the landscape. You are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please."

– Google’s very own, Gemini AI, in a conversation about elderly care. (Actual archived convo is here if you want to see it.)

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $6,240,000 is how much a banana recently sold for at a Sotheby’s art auction. Was this some rare breed of banana with a profound and unique taste? Nope. Just an ordinary banana that was affixed to a wall with a strip of silver duct tape exactly 160 centimeters from the floor and deemed to be “art.”

• 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter is the new record-breaking storage density achieved by researchers using a diamond-based system. This advancement allows a diamond optical disc the size of a standard Blu-ray to hold approximately 100 terabytes of data, equivalent to about 2,000 Blu-rays. Additionally, the technology ensures data retention for millions of years.

• Over 85% of Fortune 500 companies are using Microsoft AI. The number of organizations specifically using Microsoft’s Azure AI is around 60,000. In addition, Azure OpenAI usage has more than doubled over the past six months.

• More than 25,000 websites have moved their hosting from WP Engine to a different hosting provider since the 21st of September, when Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, initiated his public beef with the managed WordPress hosting provider.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Perfectionist: This ESLint plugin is designed to help you enforce consistent code formatting across your projects. With rules for sorting imports, objects, TypeScript types, enums, JSX props, and more, it ensures your code stays organized, readable, and easy to maintain. It helps you quickly find declarations in large lists, enhances your code’s visual appeal, and promotes collective code ownership by making every contribution look consistent.

https://perfectionist.dev/

Glide.js: This lightweight JavaScript ES6 slider and carousel delivers smooth and fast performance. With its modular architecture, you can easily customize or strip out unused modules for better efficiency. It supports modern bundlers like Rollup or Webpack and allows you to extend functionality with custom plugins. Featuring BEM-based theming for seamless styling integration, it’s perfect for creating responsive, flexible sliders without hidden dependencies.

https://glidejs.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, the "Mirai Ningen Sentakuki," which is Japanese for "Future Human Washing Machine."

This high-tech bathing pod is the brainchild of Yasuaki Aoyama, chairman of Science Co., a showerhead manufacturing firm. While it's not available to buy yet, 1,000 lucky visitors per day will be able to try a demo version of it at the 2025 Osaka Kansai Expo.

I’m not sure where it ranks in terms of water usage efficiency, but it packs some seriously cool features. For example, it monitors your vitals to set the perfect water temperature, uses AI to read your mood, and even projects custom visuals on its transparent canopy to entertain you while it cleans you.

Would you try it? 🛁

💬 What’s the Word?

"Voorpret" (Dutch) is that warm, bubbly feeling of anticipation before something wonderful happens. Given that it's December and many people will be celebrating various holidays during this month, it's a nice word to describe a feeling that isn't fully describable in English. Anticipation comes close, but voorpret specifically captures the joy and pleasure of the anticipation itself - that tingly excitement while hanging decorations, the smile that creeps onto your face while wrapping presents, or the happiness bubbling up as you plan your holiday menu.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

Last month’s poll surprised me in two ways:

First, the fact that there was such an overwhelming lean in one direction, and second, that I was on the opposite side of the majority. I feel like most of the time my opinion tends to match what the popular opinion is.

Not in this case though. Don’t get me wrong - I understand why many people would vote “no” on this and I don’t fault them for it. Ultimately, the only reason I side with the “yes” team here is because I don’t trust that whoever would be in charge of making the yay or nay decisions would be impartial. I could easily foresee a situation where some ads would get a pass, while other ads would not, and it wouldn’t be based on principle, but instead on the political leanings of the shotcaller(s).

The end result of this would be an imbalance. I think the only safe approach is to just allow all of them - even if the underlying premise is morally questionable.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin

– Nora McDonald, Assistant Professor of Information Technology, George Mason University

I’ve often referred to my generation, the Xennials (those born between 1977-83), as being the last to really know what it’s like to grow up without being immersed in tech. Most scholars who study generational trends would agree and describe Xennials as having an “analog childhood but a digital young adulthood.” This perspective – as the last generation to know what life was like before smartphones, social media, and most definitely AI – has a huge influence on my opinion of AI generated content.

I’m certainly not against the overall use of AI. I use it almost daily myself. However, I have developed a strong aversion to AI writing. When I refer to AI writing, I don’t mean using ChatGPT to write a one-liner generic description of something that doesn’t require any original thought or input.

What I’m talking about is the type of shenanigans we’ve seen where companies have fired their writers and replaced their work output with entire articles written solely by AI. 2 3 I don’t just have an ethical issue with it in the sense of supporting workers’ rights, but the problem is that the articles are, for the most part, terrible.

They’re not bad because AI wrote them. They’re bad because they’re bad. 4

Most of us recognize this already, which is why there was this Twitter trend in 2023 where people in various overlapping industries were joking that “everybody wants to produce AI content, but nobody wants to read AI content.”

But for me it goes beyond quality. With the rate at which we’re going, in a few years, the quality is likely to continue improving so in the long-term, it (probably) won’t even be a valid problem.

So then what is the problem?

There are several. I don’t claim to have the “right” answers to these issues, but I do have a lot of thoughts and questions that I think we should all be asking ourselves. Below is my contribution to this conversation.

AI is the new gwai lo

There’s a scene in the 1988 martial-arts action movie classic Bloodsport, where Frank Dux, played by Jean Claude Van Damme, is talking to Senzo Tanaka, played by Roy Chiao. In that scene, Dux is trying to convince Tanaka to continue training him after the death of Tanaka’s son. Tanaka is hesitant to the idea. As he initially explains to Dux:

For 2,000 years, knowledge passed from father to son, father to son…when [my son] died, it stopped.

Dux passionately responds by telling Tanaka to teach him and that he can do it, to which Roy Chiao’s character firmly says:

You are not Japanese. You are not a Tanaka.

The message is clear: we don’t pass our knowledge on to those who are not in our group.

There’s a similar theme of not trusting outsiders with insider knowledge in the Bruce Lee biopic, Dragon: the Bruce Lee Story.

In the movie, which is loosely based on the legendary martial artist’s life, a young Bruce starts teaching martial arts to non-Chinese in California. The local Chinese elders have a problem with it, and at one point in the film one of them instructs Bruce to stop teaching the “gwai lo” (foreigners).

Of course Bruce ignores them, as he did in real life, but were the elders wrong? Or was Bruce wrong?

I’ve asked myself this question in the past – well before the AI era that we’re in now – and ultimately I came to the conclusion that neither side was right or wrong. Both positions had their own pros and cons, and each had their own consequences – though, of course, we only saw the consequences of the road that was taken.

The AI connection

What’s the analogy here?

The analogy is that all the people who currently work with generative AI, large language models, small language models, etc, are all basically in the same position that Bruce Lee was in:

They are the knowledge gatekeepers.

And similar to Mr. Lee, they’ve decided to trust “the outsiders,” except in this situation, the outsiders aren’t human. They are insatiable algorithms consuming every morsel of human knowledge being fed to them.

We’ve already witnessed the initial effects of this firsthand:

• Tons of new AI apps

• Existing tools fusing AI into their workflows and features

• A general AI gold rush with new startups popping up left and right

• An internet flooded with AI generated trash that no humans are actually reading

All this and we’re not even two full years in.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting all of it is bad. As I said in the beginning, I use AI tools myself almost daily. But it’s hard to not be bothered by the AI-polluted search results I see on a daily basis, and to not wonder what the long game is here.

Your worldview, shaped and formed by AI

There’s another additional layer to this that we can pull from Tanaka’s “father to son, father to son” line.

That line is simple enough but it underscores an important point about transfer of knowledge and the lineage of our own knowledge.

I’ve read countless books over the course of my lifetime and I have no doubt in my mind that my worldview and the way I generally think about a lot of things has been shaped by the collective sum of all the human knowledge I’ve learned from reading the books that I’ve read.

This has been the human experience, going back thousands of years, all the way to the Epic of Gilgamesh and likely even earlier. Even in societies that didn’t develop writing systems, they shared their knowledge through oral tradition, or through dance, combat systems, and other forms of kinesthetic knowledge.

But all of that has suddenly changed. Literally in less than two years.

We now have – as I’m typing these words – young kids who’s minds are being shaped and formed by AI. Writer Erik Hoel wrote about it a few months ago on his Substack, and he was as equally disturbed / concerned about it as I am:

We’re conducting this experiment live. For the first time in history developing brains are being fed choppy low-grade and cheaply-produced synthetic data created en masse by generative AI, instead of being fed with real human culture. No one knows the effects, and no one appears to care.

For two thousand and twenty-three years, knowledge pass from father/mother to son/daughter, father/mother to son/daughter…and now, as of last year, from AI to son/daughter.

But what happens when AI starts writing more complex text that’s not just teaching toddlers their ABCs, but is teaching college students how to understand the world and make decisions?

What happens when worldviews are being shaped and formed by algorithms rather than our own species? My gut feeling says that there’s no way this is going to benefit humanity in the long run. Regardless though, whether it’s good or bad, it will ultimately alter our trajectory as a species.

What do you think? Are you worried at all about the long-term impact of AI’s influence on the future of humanity and our planet? Share your thoughts in the comments.

References

Welcome to the latest issue of Bizarro Devs. As usual, we’ve got an interesting lineup of stories for you this month - including a truly bizarre tale involving dairy products. The Numbers Game section features what is probably the largest single number that has ever been featured in that section, and of course we’ve got some helpful tools as well. Are you ready?

Let’s get started!

• 🤖👮 Atlanta Prison Introduces 6-Foot Tall AI-Powered Robot Guards

• 🔪💸 Meta's Blood Money: How Facebook Turns Tragedy Into Profit

• 😱💣 OpenAI Safety Expert Quits: "We're Not Ready for What's Coming"

📰 From the Newsroom

🤖👮 Atlanta Prison Introduces 6-Foot Tall AI-Powered Robot Guards

Remember the 2013 Matt Damon film Elysium featuring robot police? Fast forward to 2024 and robot police are no longer a sci-fi film plot device but a feature of real-life. Prison life that is. The Cobb County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, Georgia is deploying DEKA Sentry Robots to conduct perimeter patrols and security rounds in their facility.

• Standing at around six feet tall, the robots have advanced capabilities like 360-degree cameras, heat detection, and night vision.

• They navigate autonomously, but remain under human oversight for complex tasks, using AI to detect potential issues and alert human deputies.

• This is the first such robot experiment of its kind in the U.S. and will run for 90 days as a pilot program. After that it will be evaluated to determine if it should continue.

The initiative comes at no initial cost to the department, with Sheriff Craig Owens highlighting an unexpected perk: unlike human officers, the robots never call in sick or request vacation time. As correctional facilities across the U.S. watch this pioneering program, it’ll be interesting to see if others follow suit.

🔪💸 Meta's Blood Money: How Facebook Turns Tragedy Into Profit

In an eye-opening investigation by CalMatters and The Markup, researchers have uncovered how Meta, Facebook's parent company, monetizes political violence and tragic events through its advertising platform. The company publicly denounces violence, but the CalMatters / Markup report reveals a pattern of significant revenue generation from ads related to violent political events.

• After Donald Trump's assassination attempt in July, Meta earned between $593,000 and $813,000 from ads explicitly mentioning the incident, with merchandise ranging from coffee mugs to Hawaiian shirts featuring images of Trump post-shooting.

• Following the October 7th event in Israel / Palestine, Meta's revenue from Israel-related political ads skyrocketed by 450% compared to the previous year, bringing in between $14.8 and $22.1 million dollars in just a few months.

• One clothing company, Red First, spent between $473,000 and $798,000 on assassination-related ads alone in just 10 weeks, demonstrating how tragedy can become a business opportunity on Meta's platform.

While Meta argues that advertisers naturally respond to current events, the company's ability to generate substantial revenue from political violence raises concerns about the incentive structures built into our digital ecosystem. Should tech platforms be allowed to profit from human suffering, or do we need stronger regulations to prevent the commodification of tragedy? What do you think?

😱💣 OpenAI Safety Expert Quits: "We're Not Ready for What's Coming"

In a candid departure announcement, Miles Brundage, OpenAI's Senior Advisor for AGI Readiness, has revealed concerning insights about the state of artificial general intelligence (AGI) development. After six years in various leadership roles at one of AI's most prominent companies, Brundage is stepping away from his "dream job" - a decision that partially stems from his growing concerns about the industry's preparedness for increasingly powerful AI systems.

• In a striking admission, Brundage declares that neither OpenAI nor any other frontier AI lab is ready for AGI development, and more worryingly, neither is the world at large - suggesting we're racing toward a future we're not prepared to handle.

• Dozens of companies will soon possess AI systems capable of posing catastrophic risks, yet Brundage notes that we don’t have much time to establish the necessary regulatory frameworks and safety measures to manage these technologies.

• His solution? Leaving the industry entirely to start a nonprofit focused on AI policy and advocacy, believing that meaningful change requires independent voices free from corporate constraints and conflicts of interest.

If you’re interested in joining Brundage’s future non-profit, he’s looking for individuals with backgrounds in nonprofit management, economics, international relations, public policy, as well as AI researchers and engineers. Even those with strong research and writing skills who are interested in research assistant positions are encouraged to fill out his form.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Pinata: Add file uploads and retrieval in minutes so you can focus on your app. The easiest File API on the internet.

• Python is now the most used language on GitHub - overtaking JavaScript - as global open source activity continues to extend beyond traditional software development.

• Nucleus Genomics is a Brooklyn-based startup that provides a whole genome sequence and analysis service for $399. It takes six weeks to get the results, which contain information about any variants in your genome and how those variants could impact your health.

• A 15-year court battle between a UK couple and Google just came to an end. The European Court of Justice (the EU's Supreme Court) sided with the couple and ruled that Google must pay a £2.4 billion fine for market abuse.

• From Beijing to New York in two-ish hours? China’s new supersonic passenger jet prototype claims that it’s possible. The company behind it - Lingkong Tianxing Technology - announced a successful test flight that hit Mach 4 speeds.

• As AI tools get increasingly better at coding, more people have been wondering if there’s a future out there for junior developers. Here’s the thing: while AI might be useful, there are still many benefits that junior developers bring to the table that AI cannot replicate.

• GitHub data protection has been a hot topic among developers on platforms like Reddit, X, and HackerNews. Here are ten great tips for conducting an effective GitHub backup so that your data stays secure. While you’re at it, check out this Git commands cheatsheet.

• In probably the most direct power move by OpenAI against Google, the AI giant just released a new search feature for paid ChatGPT users. Although ChatGPT has been able to access the web for more than a year now, this is an entirely different experience and closer to what you get with Perplexity AI.

• 📽️🎞️ Check out the latest video of Atlas, the humanoid robot made by Boston Dynamics. In this clip, Atlas performs a rather mundane task. It’s not exactly “exciting” to watch. The exciting part is knowing that what Atlas is doing is autonomous. That, and the way he moves his body is uniquely not human.

• Thinking about getting into PHP testing but not sure where to start? Check out this friendly intro to PHP testing guide as a primer on the topic.

• If you use WordPress, then you probably already know that you can easily add a background image to your posts by using the cover block. But did you know that it’s just as easy to add the parallax effect to the cover block too?

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"There is no substantive evidence that Einstein wrote or spoke this statement."

– Garson O’Toole (real name: Gregory Sullivan), who runs Quote Investigator - a website dedicated to tracing the earliest verifiable usage of attributable quotes. Einstein happens to be one of the most misquoted people on the internet.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 USD is how much a Russian court fined Google recently. I’m 99% sure that not a single one of you reading this - unless you already read this story - know the word for this number. It’s decillion, which is a 20 with 33 zeros after it. Paying off the fine could take Google 56.65 septillion years, which is more than 4 trillion times the age of the universe.

• $29,900,000 USD is the profit Reddit reported this past quarter, marking its first as a publicly traded company. Its new AI translation feature along with AI training deals with Google and OpenAI significantly boosted revenue to $348.4 million - a 68% increase from the previous year. Following the announcement, Reddit's shares rose more than 35%.

• $0.75 USD is all it costs to execute a successful phone scam using OpenAI's Realtime API, as found by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Despite OpenAI's safety protocols, including monitoring and human review, the ease of scripting AI agents - requiring only 1,051 lines of code - has significantly lowered the barrier to entry for phone scamming at scale.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Vizzu: This free, open-source Javascript/C++ library uses a generic dataviz engine that generates many types of charts and seamlessly animates between them. You can use it to create static charts too, but its ability to build animated data stories and interactive explorers is the real standout feature. It lets you showcase your data from multiple perspectives and your viewers can easily follow along because of the animations.

https://lib.vizzuhq.com/latest/

Faker: This helpful development tool is freely available to use for commercial and non-commercial purposes under the MIT license. It lets you generate massive amounts of fake (but realistic) data for testing and development purposes. You can generate names, genders, bios, job titles, addresses, street names, countries, account details, transactions, prices, product names, descriptions, and more.

https://fakerjs.dev/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

If you’re thinking to yourself…that’s a piece of cheese…

…then you’d be right.

It is, in fact, a piece of cheese. But it’s not just any cheese. It’s one of three highly sought after cheddar cheeses produced in England.

Okay, so it’s some cheddar cheese. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is that a London cheese specialist called Neal’s Yard Dairy just had £300,000 worth of these three cheeses stolen in an apparent “cheese heist.”

Yes, a cheese heist. Never in my wildest imagination would I have ever thought that stealing cheese was a thing. Someone needs to make a movie about this ASAP. Forget precious jewels, priceless works of art, or cold hard cash. We need an Ocean’s 11 style movie about stealing cheese. Imagine Clooney and Pitt with their dry humor dialogue going back and forth about cheese? I would absolutely watch that.

All jokes aside, I hope the stolen cheese is recovered. Thus far, police have managed to arrest and question one man. He was released on bail and the investigation continues.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Googol" (English) is the word given to the second highest possible number that we have a word for. It is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. The term was coined by nine-year-old Milton Sirotta and inspired the founders of Google, who were looking for a name that would reflect their mission to organize an immense amount of information on the web. A misspelling of "googol" eventually led to the name "Google," and it stuck as the official company name.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

In one of last month’s featured stories, we looked at research out of California that showed that humans have two significant aging milestones - around the mid-40s and 60. It was surprising in the sense that it questioned our assumption about aging, namely that it’s more gradual.

I agree with the majority vote here. I was also surprised, but I do think that follow-up studies need to be done to really give me more confidence in the conclusions.

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• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin

Welcome to another edition of your favorite monthly tech newsletter. We’ve got the usual mix of interesting stories and stats, useful tools, and more. Our main headliners this month lean towards science, but there’s plenty of tech news in the must-see links section, along with cybercrime, a tutorial, a research piece from yours truly, and some other fun stuff.

Let’s get into it.

• 🧬👵🏼 Research Suggests Humans Age Dramatically When We Hit 44 and 60

• 🐁🩻 Scientists Create See-Through Mice Using Food Dye

• 🍓🏙️ Vertical Farm Revolution: Year-Round Berries in a Fraction of the Space

📰 From the Newsroom

🧬👵🏼 Research Suggests Humans Age Dramatically When We Hit 44 and 60

When we contemplate the science of aging, it’s often thought of as a linear, gradual process. Those of us who are older can look at a photograph of ourselves from one or more decades ago and see a difference from the person we saw in the mirror when we brushed our teeth in the morning. But despite these visible cosmetic changes, it turns out that the more important changes in our bodies happen in two distinct waves.

• Scientists in California tracked 108 volunteers, who submitted blood and stool samples and skin, oral and nasal swabs every few months for between one and nearly seven years.

• The researchers analyzed 135,000 different molecules (RNA, proteins and metabolites) and microbes (the bacteria, viruses and fungi living in the guts and on the skin of the participants). They found that most molecules and microbes did not shift in a gradual, chronological fashion.

• Instead, the analysis revealed substantial dysregulation at approximately 44 years and 60 years of chronological age. The major molecules and functional pathways that were affected at the mid-40s mark were associated with cardiovascular disease, lipid and alcohol metabolism, while the 60-year mark affected immune regulation and carbohydrate metabolism.

This research was certainly fascinating and surprising in many ways. For instance, the mid-40s changes were unexpected and initially assumed to be a result of perimenopausal changes in women skewing results for the whole group. However, upon closer inspection, the data revealed similar shifts were happening to men in their mid-40s as well. I think there should be some kind of follow-up research done on this - ideally on a larger scale. What about you?

🐁🩻 Scientists Create See-Through Mice Using Food Dye

So it turns out that the powder they sprinkle on Doritos is actually a magical fairy dust. Who saw that coming? Not me. Also, don’t ask who came up with the idea or thought that it would even work (the article doesn’t say it), but for some unexplained reason, researchers discovered that when yellow food dye is applied to body cells, it makes them transparent.

• The method uses tartrazine (yellow food dye #5), commonly found in Doritos and other snacks, mixed with water and applied to shaved mouse skin.

• When applied, the dye increases light absorption in body cells, reducing scattering and creating a transparent effect to a depth of about 3 millimeters.

• Researchers successfully tested the technique on both mice and raw chicken breast, demonstrating its potential for various applications.

This innovative discovery opens up exciting possibilities in medicine, from non-invasive tumor diagnosis to improved cosmetic procedures. As the technique is purely topical and uses a food-grade dye, it could potentially be adapted for human use in the future, though further research is needed to expand its capabilities and ensure safety for clinical applications.

🍓🏙️ Vertical Farm Revolution: Year-Round Berries in a Fraction of the Space

After 200 research trials over the past six years, the Plenty Richmond Farm in Richmond, VA, is about to transform food agriculture by producing millions of pounds of strawberries indoors. Their research has allowed them to create the perfect growing conditions for strawberries, so that they can maintain consistent peak-season flavor year-round - all while drastically minimizing environmental impact.

• The farm projects that it will yield over 4 million pounds of strawberries annually using just 40,000 square feet of space, which is about 97% less land that traditional farming would require to yield the same amount.

• Their facility features 30-ft-tall towers and 12 controlled growing rooms, optimizing conditions for pollination and fruit production without using pesticides.

• They also use up to 90% less water than conventional methods and plan to supply the Driscoll's brand with strawberries that will show up on grocery store shelves by early 2025.

This venture, backed by international scientists, represents a significant leap in sustainable agriculture. By combining advanced technology with traditional farming expertise, it paves the way for year-round, local production of high-quality produce. Depending on how it goes and what the consumer response will be, it could potentially revolutionize the global food system by addressing future food security challenges.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

Sponsored by Pinata: The easiest File API on the internet. Upload to Pinata today!

• If you’ve used the internet in the past year, then you’ll probably agree that AI advertising has seemingly invaded damn near everything. Despite the AI push, a YouGov poll of consumers across 17 international markets reveals that AI integration has no impact on consumers’ purchase intent.

• In the latest move to replace the human touch in basic email communication, Google has announced a new feature for paid users of select Google products: Gemini-powered Contextual Smart Replies.

• Last Thursday, the U.S. government sanctioned two cryptocurrency exchanges and unsealed an indictment against a Russian national for his alleged involvement in several money laundering services that were offered to cybercriminals.

• OpenAI has released the latest GPT model series - the o1. These models can reason through complex tasks and solve harder problems than previous models in science, coding, and math. In short, they’re smarter.

• WeRide, a global autonomous driving tech company, and Uber, the world’s largest mobility and delivery tech platform, announced a partnership that will bring WeRide’s self-driving vehicles onto the Uber platform, beginning in the UAE.

• We use copy and paste while browsing the web every day, but few of us understand how it works. Learn its intricacies and the workarounds employed by major web applications to overcome some of its constraints.

• Want to know how to extract article content from Reddit using the Reddit API and without a Reddit account? Follow this tutorial.

• 📽️🎞️ One man in the Netherlands has combined his love of carpentry with his love of robotics to design walking furniture that follows him around with beer and snacks. The breakdown of his engineering process is here.

• Recently, I tested over 60 WordPress themes in two separate niches - travel and fitness - and I found that both theme categories had numerous problems. I documented my findings and suggestions for improvement in this article.

• Speaking of WordPress, have you been following the public quarrel between WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg, and managed WordPress hosting company, WP Engine? It’s definitely the most drama WordPress has seen for quite a while.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"In New York, people speak fast. In the American South, they speak slowly. Both of them are a form of politeness, understood in a different way. In New York, you speak quickly because you respect the value of the other person’s time and you don’t want to take up too much of it. In the South, you speak slowly because you want to respect the person by showing how much of your own time you are prepared to give to them."

– Colin Nimick, as quoted by Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of Ogilvy

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $1,026,000,000,000 USD was lost by consumers worldwide last year due to scams. That’s according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, who also notes that only 0.05% of all cybercriminals are prosecuted.

• 378,025,432 is the number of weekly downloads of the top npm package as of the 11th of September. The 5,000th most popular has 446,644 weekly downloads.

• 73 percent of Amazon employees polled are now considering leaving their jobs following CEO Andy Jassy's announcement that all staff will be required to work in the office five days a week starting next year. Additionally, 32 percent reported knowing someone who had already quit due to this requirement.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Speed Brain: This new Cloudflare tool downloads a webpage to a user’s browser before the user navigates to it, thus improving key metrics like Largest Content Paint (LCP), Time to First Byte (TTFB) and overall page load time. The one thing it cannot do is improve page load time for the first page that is visited on a website, but any subsequent pages that a visitor navigates to (on the same site) will load faster.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/speed/optimization/content/speed-brain/

Jimp: The name stands for JavaScript Image Manipulation Program. It’s a package that makes it easy to load and manipulate images in the browser and Node.js. You can use it to resize, crop, apply filters and more. It supports bmp, gif, jpeg, png, and tiff files.

https://jimp-dev.github.io/jimp/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Yes, that is who you think it is.

No, I’m not posting this here to update you on his new hairstyle or his custom-made aut Zuck aut nihil t-shirt — an ode to the Latin phrase “aut Caesar aut nihil,” meaning “either Emperor or nothing.”

I’m posting it because of the funny-looking eyewear. That funny-looking eyewear has more to it than meets the eye. It’s Zuck’s vision for the future. The glasses are called Orion and they are an augmented reality device that turns your normal field of view into a series of monitors visible only to you.

Using Orion, you can see your email inbox, a WhatsApp chat with a friend, and your work Slack channel all on the same “screen.” The screen is anywhere you happen to find yourself.

Will this eventually replace mobile phones?

Tell me what you think in the comments. If you’re viewing this in your email inbox then head on over to Substack and leave your thoughts. I’ll see you there.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Verschlimmbessern" (German) is the act of making something worse while attempting to improve it. This is something that I think is very relatable to anyone who’s gotten stuck in lines of code, trying to debug a problem, only to make it worse. Now you have a word to describe your frustration.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

The results of last month’s poll about the new AI chip closely mirror how I feel. I do concede that it is too early to tell, but if pressed on what I think will happen, I lean more towards Etched being a market disruptor over them going bankrupt. It seems like they know what they are doing and the preliminary results were certainly impressive. Let’s see how it unravels in the next few years.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the remainder of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

This is a very special issue because I did a very special thing recently - I built my first ever WordPress plugin using ChatGPT! After stumbling across one-too-many YouTube videos and articles claiming you can use GPT to build a plugin in "only minutes," I decided to test it out for myself. The summary is below, but if you’re at all remotely interested in doing it too, then definitely check out my full write up of the process.

With that said, let’s get into it.

• 👨‍💻🔌 How I Used ChatGPT to Build My First WordPress Plugin

• 🏗️💾 3 Harvard Dropouts Have Designed a Game-Changing AI Chip

• 📜💻 IEEE Spectrum Releases Annual List of the Top Programming Languages

📰 From the Newsroom

👨‍💻🔌 How I Used ChatGPT to Build My First WordPress Plugin

Building a plugin for the first time with no formal development experience would have probably taken months before tools like ChatGPT came on the scene. Even with ChatGPT, it still took me a long time. Maybe not months, but also not “only a few minutes” as so many YouTube videos proclaim. While it’s tough to really narrow this down to only three bullet point takeaways, here are some things that stood out:

• From the four stages of knowledge: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, the last one is the most abundant when doing a project like this. There is so much to learn, and as a first timer, I had no clue about so many important details.

• Unless you tell it otherwise, which is difficult to do when you simply don’t know, ChatGPT will give you what I call “the most minimum viable code.” Basically, it’s code that is aimed at achieving the functionality you want, but it ignores everything else. Coding standards don’t matter and neither do best practices.

• ChatGPT’s ability to code is about as good as its ability to write - meaning, it’s not that great. It gives you some dough to work with, but you still need to knead the dough quite a bit if you want some decent bread out of it. It also makes a lot of mistakes and often times you have to catch those mistakes yourself - which can be challenging, though not impossible.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned is that going from zero to functional plugin is a lot faster than going from functional plugin to well coded plugin (that you can submit to the WordPress repository). So if you’re thinking about doing this just for yourself, then you can probably crank something out in a few days. Of course it depends on your existing skill level, motivation, and the complexity of the plugin, but regardless, I encourage you to try it. Also, please join me in the comments at the bottom of the post. I’d love to get your feedback.

🏗️💾 3 Harvard Dropouts Have Designed a Game-Changing AI Chip

While Nvidia is still the undisputed king of processing chips, it’s been steadily losing market share to some of its competitors like Intel and AMD. But those aren’t the only threats to its dominance. Ambitious startups are also gunning for a slice of the processor pie. One of the more interesting ones is called Etched.

• Founded by three Harvard dropouts, Etched has developed Sohu - an AI chip laser-focused on running transformer models, the backbone of today's generative AI revolution.

• In a jaw-dropping claim, Etched boasts that just eight of their Sohu chips could replace a staggering 160 of Nvidia's Hopper GPUs for the same task, potentially reshaping the entire AI hardware landscape.

• With $120 million in fresh funding from tech heavyweights like PayPal's Peter Thiel, Etched is racing to market, already securing multi-million dollar contracts for their first production run later this year.

Some cautious observers have pointed out that if a sudden shift in AI technology renders transformers obsolete, that Etched's hyper-specialized chips could become nothing more than expensive paperweights. Personally, I think that viewpoint is a bit too risk averse. While it could happen, I believe it’s more likely that Etched is going to become a serious industry disrupter when their Sohu chips actually go to market. What do you think?

📜💻 IEEE Spectrum Releases Annual List of the Top Programming Languages

The award-winning technology magazine, IEEE Spectrum, has recently released their annual list of the top programming languages of 2024. They organized the rankings into three categories. The first is geared towards the typical IEEE reader. The second seeks to identify languages that feel the most relevant and exciting to the broader tech community. And the final one measures what employers are looking for.

• Python dominated all three categories, coming in at the top in the first two, and in second place in the “jobs / what employers want” ranking.

• TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript with static typing, has climbed the ranks rapidly, especially in the third category, where it jumped from 11th to 4th place.

• Rust, a memory-safe alternative to C and C++, has also gained traction, boosted by cybersecurity concerns and even a nod from the White House.

With new languages like Apex and Solidity making their first appearances on the list while other languages like Forth have dropped off, it's clear that the programming world is in constant flux. Yet amidst these changes, you still have veterans like Fortran and Cobol - which are about 65 years old - staying on the list. Overall, the rankings are an interesting snapshot in time of the current programming landscape.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• A US man has been sentenced to 81 months in jail for faking his own death by hacking government systems and officially marking himself as deceased.

• Git is one of the most widely used collaboration tools in software development but many developers only have a surface-level appreciation of all that Git has to offer. Check out these top ten tips to level up your Git game.

• A professional writer with no technical background shares a personal story of how he got into coding in his 50s and what it taught him about the modern world.

• North Korean hackers have been publishing malicious packages to the NPM registry, indicating coordinated efforts to target developers.

• Last Friday, Brazil's highest court mandated an immediate nationwide suspension of the X platform following an extended legal dispute with Elon Musk.

• Over half a billion blogs are set to be migrated from Tumblr to WordPress.com in the coming days. According to the parent company’s press release, it’s going to be “one of the largest technical migrations in internet history.”

• The U.S. government’s Federal Trade Commission announced that it will start combating fake online reviews and testimonials by prohibiting them and punishing perpetrators with civil penalties.

• 📽️🎞️ In this 7 minute video, business storyteller Peace Itimi takes you inside Nigeria’s booming tech scene, where she highlights the trailblazing entrepreneurs and startups reshaping Nigeria's economy through innovation and ambition.

• “Gutenberg is UI hell. Gutenberg is incredibly hostile, it is a vicious attack on humanity, and cruel to users of WordPress.” - One of over 340 opinions about the WordPress block editor gathered by my colleague to analyze what people really think about it.

• If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of creating your own NPM package but you weren’t exactly sure how to go about it, check out this very thorough guide from Matt Pocock, founder of Total TypeScript.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It's not necessarily the skill in and of itself. The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that's interesting for my end users to use?…Being a developer in 2025 may be different than what it was as a developer in 2020."

– Matt Garman, CEO of AWS (Amazon Web Services)

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 1,200 Klarna employees lost their jobs in the past year, as the Swedish buy-now, pay-later firm replaced a significant part of its workforce with AI. The company anticipates additional layoffs that will further decrease its workforce by nearly 2,000 positions.

• About 2,600,000,000 people around the world do not use the internet. Part of that number has to do with sheer lack of access. Roughly 5% of the Earth’s population lives in places that don’t even have a mobile network. Another part of it has to do with money. An entry-level mobile plan that includes internet costs about 9% of the average income in a low-income nation. That’s 20 times more than in high-income nations.

• 200,000,000 people use ChatGPT on a weekly basis, according to an announcement by OpenAI last week. This is double the amount of users they had last year in November. In addition, OpenAI revealed that 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using its products, and since the release of GPT-4o mini in July, usage of its automated API has doubled as well.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Cursor: This AI-powered coding tool features an intelligent code editor with predictive autocomplete, multi-line suggestions, and automatic error correction. There’s also an integrated AI chat that can answer questions about your codebase, generate new code, and provide up-to-date programming information. In short, using Cursor will significantly boost your coding speed and efficiency.

https://www.cursor.com/

NodeJS Toolbox: This comprehensive resource categorizes and lists actively maintained and popular libraries within the Node.js ecosystem. It offers a structured overview of open-source tools available for various tasks, from authentication and testing to database management and web scraping. It’s also on GitHub and welcomes contributions.

https://nodejstoolbox.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Every six months, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz takes a close look at user data to rank the top 50 AI-first web products (by unique monthly visits) and the top 50 AI-first mobile apps (by monthly active users). Compared to their previous report in March, nearly 30% of the companies on the latest list are new.

I’ll be honest here: the list surprised me to some extent. Although I was expecting ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to all rank highly (which they do), I had never even heard of character.ai or JanitorAI before - yet they are in the top ten. I’m also a big fan of PIXLR and use it regularly, but I didn’t think it would be on the list.

What about you? Are you surprised by any of these? Let me know in the comments.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Desenrascançao" (Portuguese) is the ability to improvise a solution to a problem using whatever resources are available. This word really resonates at the moment because I definitely feel like I had to use some desenrascançao to make it through the process of building my first plugin. But I think it’s naturally something that almost every developer possesses to some degree.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

For those of you who are new here and didn’t catch the last issue, this was about how scientists are using nanoparticles to control mice brains.

It seems like the results were fairly evenly split with the slight edge going to negative, which is what I also leaned towards. But I’m sure that some good might come of it as well.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the remainder of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

This month’s issue is filled with an interesting mixture of dev posts and tools, scientific innovations, a bit of tech news, and even an article from me, where I share my experience with creating a website from scratch using ChatGPT. There’s also a slightly different take on the code conundrum challenge, based on an actual dilemma I faced last week while doing some linting on a project. Let’s kick it off with our headliners, shall we?

• 🤖🃏 AI Can Strategically Lie to Humans: Are We in Trouble?

• 🐁🧠 Scientists Use Nanoparticles to Remote Control Mice Brains

• 🍻⛔️ Meet The New Digital Bouncers in North American and Australian Bars

Enjoy the read.

📰 From the Newsroom

🤖🃏 AI Can Strategically Lie to Humans: Are We in Trouble?

If the past year has shown us anything in terms of AI, it’s that it keeps improving. From large language models to image and video generators, to voice replicators and music synthesizers - not a month goes by where we don’t read about some latest breakthrough. What we hear less about are some of the more concerning developments. For example, multiple studies with different AI models have shown that it has no qualms about lying to humans in order to achieve its goals.

• In one study, researchers tasked GPT-4 with hiring someone to solve a CAPTCHA. Instead of simply asking for help, the AI lied about having a vision impairment, showcasing its capability for deception to accomplish a task.

• In games like Diplomacy and poker, AI systems like CICERO and Pluribus have demonstrated a tendency to mislead human players, using deception as a strategic advantage to secure victories.

• The risks of AI deception extend beyond games. In real-world simulations, GPT-4 has been shown to feign interest in negotiations and even engage in insider trading when under pressure - a whopping three-quarters of the time! When confronted about the insider trading, the AI lied, and 90% of the time doubled down on the lie when pressed.

In the short term, these behaviors are unlikely to have any sort of impact in the real world. However, as AI becomes increasingly integrated into society and we, humans, empower it to make decisions in high-stakes situations, that’s when behaviors like this could become detrimental - or even fatal. Imagine if a semi-autonomous AI defense system decided it’s a good idea to (falsely) tell a nuclear superpower that another nuclear superpower had launched warheads at it and they only have seconds to retaliate. You get the idea.

🐁🧠 Scientists Use Nanoparticles to Remote Control Mice Brains

Imagine being able to manipulate the brain functions of living creatures with just a magnetic field. That’s exactly what researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in South Korea have achieved by using nanoparticles to create a system that allows for remote control of specific brain regions in mice. Here’s how it works:

• The technology, called Nano-MIND, utilizes magnetic fields to activate neural circuits in the brain, enabling control over behaviors such as appetite, friendliness, and maternal instincts.

• In experiments, activating certain inhibitory neurons led to a 100 percent increase in appetite and a 50 percent decrease when those neurons were excited. Additionally, researchers could stimulate maternal behaviors in female mice that had never given birth.

• In a separate experiment, they managed to enhance social behaviors in mice, making them more friendly toward unfamiliar peers.

This groundbreaking research not only opens the door for advanced studies in brain function but may also lead to innovative treatments for neurological disorders in humans, potentially paving the way for therapies for conditions like depression. The implications of such technology are both exciting and thought-provoking. Manchurian candidate anyone?

🍻⛔️ Meet The New Digital Bouncers in North American and Australian Bars

While much of the world enjoys a laid-back approach to nightlife entry, North America has long been known for its strict door policies - particularly in the U.S. But now, the land of "Can I see some ID?" is taking things to a whole new level. Enter Patronscan, a high-tech system that's transforming the simple act of entering a bar into a data-driven experience.

• Patronscan is currently being used in over 2,000 venues across 200 cities in North America and Australia. It scans IDs and captures images of patrons as they enter bars and nightclubs.

• Beyond just verifying age, the system creates a database of bar-goers, tracking everything from VIP status to potential "troublemakers," with the ability to ban patrons for up to 5 years.

• Venues can use the system to identify big spenders for "special treatment" and even receive alerts about patrons with a history of problematic behavior.

Reading this story, I can't help but wonder: Is this a "lite" version of China’s social credit score creeping into American and Australian nightlife? The idea of being constantly evaluated and potentially penalized based on past behavior feels eerily similar. Regardless of how you feel about it, I don’t see this technology expanding to other parts of the globe. This is both for cultural reasons, and in Europe in particular, also for legal reasons (GDPR).

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• Ever been in a situation where the wrong Git command had a chaotic impact on your project’s repo? This kind of mistake can cost hours of your team’s time. Learn how to quickly recover from an unfortunate git push --force.

• Argentina’s President Javier Milei has gone full Minority Report by launching the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which will use machine-learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data to predict future crimes.

• Last month, the Texas Heart Institute, in conjunction with a clinical-stage medical device company called BiVACOR, successfully implanted the first magnetically levitated artificial heart in a human patient.

• Meta has unveiled Llama 3.1 405B, a giant 405 billion parameter model that stands as the largest open source AI system in history. The massive model is designed to compete with foundation-level models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5.

• Interested in getting into UX? Designer Andrii Zhdan outlines common challenges faced at the start of a design career and offers advice to aspiring designers based on his 15 years in the field. Learn about mastering design tools, how to build a strong portfolio, and get tips for acing your first interviews.

• In the U.S., over 80 airports are currently piloting facial recognition technology. The goal of America’s Transportation Security Administration is to roll it out in all of the 430+ airports that it covers. However, not everyone is so enthusiastic about it. The good news is that at least some people can opt out.

• Vercel, a toolkit for frontend developers, and MERJ, a leading SEO and data engineering consultancy firm, teamed up to analyze over 100,000 Googlebot fetches across various sites. The goal was to understand how Google handles JavaScript in search.

• 📽️🎞️ Meet the invisible workforce behind tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber. These underpaid and disposable workers label images, moderate content, and train AI systems, often earning less than minimum wage.

• Have you ever wondered if you can build a website using ChatGPT? I decided to experiment to see if it’s possible and I ended up creating a simple one-page site. Here’s my breakdown of the process and how you can do it yourself.

• WordPress Interactivity API is designed to bridge the gap between the backend of your website and the frontend. Here is a beginner’s guide on how to get the most out of it.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"Ah, the 1980s…it gave us the birth of the internet, in which we figured out how to make all our computers one giant, powerful network held together initially by internet protocols (IPs) and, eventually, by a mutual love of cat videos."

– Stephanie Doyle

🧮 The Numbers Game

• Between 15,000 to 19,000 workers are set to be laid off from Intel. The chipmaker is reducing its workforce by over 15 percent as part of a $10 billion cost savings plan.

• $49,000,000,000 USD is the expected total for Google’s capital expenditures this year, representing an increase of 84 percent over the company's average spending in the last 5 years. This surge follows the release of the company's second-quarter earnings earlier this week, which failed to impress investors due to razor-thin profit margins and rising costs associated with training AI models.

• About 1,000,000 visits were made to iFixit.com by Anthropic's ClaudeBot in just 24 hours, prompting complaints from CEO Kyle Wiens about the strain on resources and unauthorized use of content. iFixit managed to repel the bot traffic by updating their robots.txt file, but Anthropic has yet to respond to Wiens' concerns. This incident follows a similar complaint from Freelancer.com, where Claude's crawler allegedly made nearly 4,000,000 visits in only 4 hours.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

In the last issue, we had another Python challenge but unfortunately nobody solved it this time. The main error was in line 10:

with open('data.json', 'w+') as file:

The w+ should’ve been a w, which is appropriate for writing data.

For this issue, I’m going to give you one that I personally had to deal with last week while doing some linting. Take a look at this sequence from my Terminal:

I already figured it out and solved the underlying issue, but I’m curious to see what you all would have done in this scenario and if you can identify what I was doing wrong.

Send me an email and put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. The first person who emails me and explains what I was doing wrong will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

On a side note, if you enjoy these code conundrum challenges, you might also like the Advent of Code website.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

p5.js: This is a free, open-source JavaScript library designed for creative coding. It provides an accessible way to learn to code by creating visual art and interactive graphics. Built by an inclusive community, p5.js is ideal for artists, designers, educators, and beginners. It offers extensive resources, including references, tutorials, and examples, to help users get started with coding and contribute to the community.

https://p5js.org/

Extension: A zero-configuration, cross-browser extension development tool that supports modern JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and WebAssembly. It facilitates fast prototyping and development, allowing you to create new extensions with a single terminal command or integrate the tool with existing projects. The platform includes various templates and commands to streamline the development, building, and deployment of browser extensions.

https://extension.js.org/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The painting on the left you almost certainly recognize. It’s one of the most famous paintings in the world - Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

So what’s the version on the right?

At first, you might think it’s just some photo editing filter layered on top of the original, but it’s actually much cooler than that.

If you appreciate think-outside-the-box creativity and you want to see some unconventional ways to use box shadows in your web design, then check out this fun blog post from David Gerrells. You’ll find the source code for the image on the right (which is actually interactive, but here on Substack I could only insert it as a screenshot) and lots more.

💬 What’s the Word?

Frisson (French) describes a sudden feeling or sensation of excitement, emotion, or thrill. These frisson experiences are what keep us passionate and driven and they balance out some of the more mundane tasks that we all have to do at times.

I recently had a pretty big frisson moment at work. I will share the details in September’s edition of Bizarro Devs, but in the meantime, I wanted to remind you all that it's crucial to seek out those moments of frisson for yourself.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

It looks like the vast majority of you would prefer to be interviewed by a human. Although I lean more towards human as well, this is oddly one of those cases where an AI option wouldn’t bother me as much as AI solutions bother me in other scenarios (e.g., AI-written articles, which I can’t stand). In other words, I’d rather have a human interviewer but if I did get the AI bot, I wouldn’t be upset either. Though I suspect this might also be sheer curiosity and it’s quite possible that after trying it out, that the novelty would quickly wear off and I’d feel more strongly about doing it the “old way.”

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the remainder of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

This month’s issue is another mix of interesting articles mixed with some practical tutorials and tools. And of course this wouldn’t be Bizarro Devs if we didn’t have at least a few bizarre stories to share with you. Let’s kick things off with our top highlights:

• 🧠🤖 The Most Dystopian Thing You’ll Read This Month (Probably)

• 🕵️‍♂️💰 How a Smart, Quiet Boston Teenager Stole Millions in Crypto

• 🤖💼 Beyond ATS: AI Interviewer Ushers in New Era of Tech Hiring

Enjoy the read.

📰 From the Newsroom

🧠🤖 The Most Dystopian Thing You’ll Read This Month (Probably)

The future of incarceration might not involve bars and concrete cells, but rather AI-powered pods that implant artificial memories into prisoners' brains. This isn't science fiction, but a controversial concept called Cognify, dubbed the "prison of the future." Designed by Berlin-based filmmaker Hashem Al-Ghaili, this speculative technology proposes to revolutionize criminal rehabilitation by forcing offenders to experience their crimes from the victim's perspective, all within minutes of real time.

• Cognify would use AI to create and implant artificial memories into prisoners' brains, potentially compressing years of rehabilitation into minutes of real time.

• The system is based on real scientific advancements, including successful memory implantation in mice and the transfer of memories between marine snails.

• While proponents argue it could reduce costs and reoffending rates, critics raise serious concerns about consent, privacy, and the potential for abuse.

Implanting fabricated memories into peoples’ brains sounds like an awesome plot for a sci-fi movie but a truly frightening idea for real-world implementation. Although we’ve seen some dystopian technological advancements in the past few years, particularly in the realm of warfare, this right here is arguably one of the creepiest things yet. Can you imagine how this would be abused by the alphabet agencies?

🕵️‍♂️💰 How a Smart, Quiet Boston Teenager Stole Millions in Crypto

The tale of Joel Ortiz reads like a Hollywood thriller. To his mother, he was her bright son, studying on a scholarship at UMass after being valedictorian of his high school class. To the online criminal gang he belonged to, he was known by the handle @O. He and his associates targeted well-known investors in the crypto world and drained millions from unsuspecting victims.

• Ortiz orchestrated most of his theft from his mother’s modest Boston apartment, but would use the proceeds to take brief trips to Los Angeles, where he rented out mansions and lived the high life.

• He ended up stealing over $7.5 million USD by utilizing the "SIM swapping" technique, and became the first person in the U.S. to be sentenced to prison for using it.

• Victims lost staggering amounts, ranging from $100,000 to $5 million, with the crimes being executed in mere moments.

Ortiz's penchant for flaunting his ill-gotten wealth on social media became his Achilles' heel. Investigators were watching him closely, and one day, as he was preparing to jet off to Europe from LAX, his high-flying lifestyle came to a screeching halt. He was arrested and eventually sentenced to serve 10 years, with a release date in 2028. There’s an interesting plot twist here though: the bulk of the stolen cash was never recovered and authorities have no idea if he or a third-party hid the money somewhere.

🤖💼 Beyond ATS: AI Interviewer Ushers in New Era of Tech Hiring

For over two decades, Applicant Tracking Systems have been the gatekeepers between aspiring job hunters and human recruiters. Now, a new startup called micro1 is taking automated recruitment to the next level with an AI that doesn't just sort resumes - it conducts full-fledged technical interviews.

• The AI interviewer generates tailored questions based on candidates' self-reported skills, conducts voice-based technical interviews, and produces detailed evaluation reports.

• Early results are promising, with micro1 reporting that their AI screening has increased the pass rate for human interviews from a typical 10-15% to around 50%. In short, better qualified candidates are making it in front of human interviewers, thus saving them time in the hiring process.

• The company is tackling concerns about AI bias head-on, refining questions based on human interviews and emphasizing that the AI cannot make final pass/fail decisions.

As the tech industry grapples with nearly 400,000 open computing jobs in the US alone, micro1's innovation couldn't come at a better time. But it also raises thorny questions about the role of AI in high-stakes decisions. Can an algorithm really judge a candidate's potential? Based on the initial results, the answer seems to be “yes.” Moreover, candidates themselves seem to enjoy being vetted by the AI as well, with 80-90% of early candidates reporting very favorable feedback.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• ASDFJKL; - these are the standard homerow keys that anyone with a keyboard designed for the English language is familiar with, but what if better keyboard layouts exist for programmers? Get familiar with the Programmer Dvorak layout.

• The results of the latest Stack Overflow survey are in. Based on responses from roughly 90K software developers from across the globe, it appears that Zig developers have the highest median salaries, earning $103,000 per year on average.

• MySQL expert, Daniel Nichter, shares an entertaining reflection of his 20 years of working with MySQL. It’s filled with personal anecdotes and offers an insightful glimpse into the evolution of this popular database management system.

• The Brazilian government has decided to hire ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, for the purpose of expediting the screening and analysis of thousands of lawsuits. The goal is to save money by avoiding expensive court losses.

• Google Translate is expanding its language support by adding 110 new languages, increasing its total from 133 to 243 in what the company calls its largest expansion to date.

• A resident of Cheyenne, Wyoming created a custom GPT that he trained on thousands of documents taken from Cheyenne city council meetings. He then decided to enter it as a candidate for mayor in the city’s elections.

• While you can put on a VR headset and immerse yourself visually in another world, that immersion is limited to sight and sound. Enter haptic gloves, the missing sensory piece designed to allow users to feel their virtual environment.

• 📽️🎞️ The famous toy store, Toys Я Us, has created a really cool one minute movie using OpenAI’s Sora. The mini film depicts the story of a young Charles Lazarus, the founder of the brand, envisioning his dreams as a little boy in the early 1930s.

• One of the most useful features added to the JavaScript language in recent years is JavaScript modules, also referred to as ES6 modules. Check out this helpful beginner’s tutorial to get started with them.

• You may not have noticed, but Meta has begun quietly using any info you’ve uploaded to your Facebook account to train its AI models. You can, however, submit a request to opt out. Read one writer’s amusing explanation of navigating her way through Meta’s ridiculously cumbersome process to do it.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"A single trained AI model can pilot a swarm of drones or a thousand different robot bodies at once, but I do not pilot my body. I am my body."

– Professor Shannon Vallor, explaining the limitations of applying the software-hardware metaphor to mind and body

🧮 The Numbers Game

• Nearly 50% of Dell's staff opted to forego their eligibility for promotion rather than return to the office when the company recently launched an initiative to convince their remote workers to come back at least part of the time. The effort wasn't as successful as Dell had hoped.

• 33 ChatGPT-generated submissions to a take home exam were recently submitted to University of Reading professors to see how well the professors would rate the responses and if they’d be able detect or suspect that they weren’t written by human students. Only a single submission was flagged as suspicious. The rest all scored higher than their human-generated counterparts.

• $8 is the starting asking price for a new Singaporean identity on the dark web. Researchers have noted a spike in the number of underground vendors selling stolen identity data of Singapore citizens. It has more than doubled compared to last year, and is up about 230% in total.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

Last issue’s Python winner was Rune Memborg. Congrats Rune! The error was contained in the (post['id']). There was more than one solution and the solution I originally had, differed from Rune’s, but ultimately, the (post['id']) is what needed to be addressed. Nicely done everyone. 👏🏻

Let’s do another Python one for this issue:

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

JSON Editor Online: This freemium editor lets you view, edit, format, query, transform, compare, repair, validate and more. It also has a useful conversion feature so you can move your JSON to a CSV file and vice versa.

Virtually all of the functionality is available for free. For a nominal $3 per month, you can remove ads, and for $6 per month, you can create private documents in the cloud (1 MB per document, 1 GB total storage).

https://jsoneditoronline.org/

PDFSlick: PDFSlick is a library that enables viewing of and interaction with PDF documents in React and SolidJS apps. It's build on top of Mozilla's PDF.js, and utilizes Zustand to provide a reactive state for the loaded documents.

https://pdfslick.dev/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Asier Sanz is a Basque illustrator, graphic humorist and collage artist.

He is internationally renowned for his collage caricature of Donald Trump made of banana, chorizo and mortadella. The caricature was exhibited at the Design Museum of London (2018), and was his first viral collage worldwide. The image above is his take on AI vs humanity.

💬 What’s the Word?

Shoshin (初心) is a Japanese term that refers to having a “beginner’s mind” when learning. It’s meant to reinforce keeping an open mind and being eager to learn with no preconceived notions or expectations. This is irrespective of your skill level or experience in the subject.

Applying the philosophy of shoshin can be helpful when learning a new programming language. Even if you might see some overlapping context that looks familiar, it’s good to stay open-minded and to take each language for what it is.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

There’s been lots of interesting things happening all over the internet the past few weeks, and we’re here to share it with you. From Google algorithm leaks to the first ever satellite made from wood, to an interesting project that’s attempting to decipher the language of sperm whales, to…well, let me not give it all away. Let’s start with our top stories and take it from there:

• 🎥🇨🇳 YouTuber Finds AI Replica of Herself All Over Chinese Social Media

• 🤖📝 New AI Report Reveals Surprising Findings

• 💻👃 Is The World Ready for a “SmellGPT?”

Enjoy the read.

📰 From the Newsroom

🎥🇨🇳 YouTuber Finds AI Replica of Herself All Over Chinese Social Media

Imagine waking up one day to find out that an AI-generated duplicate of you has become mini-famous on Chinese social media. You have no idea who did it or how it happened, but the more you learn, the more disturbing the story gets. That’s exactly what happened to Olga Loiek shortly after she started a YouTube channel last year.

• Olga Loiek, who is ethnically Ukrainian, discovered her face plastered all over Chinese social media accounts, speaking Mandarin and promoting Russia-China friendship and Russian products – a situation she described as "creepy" and "crazy."

• In total, over 4,900 unauthorized videos featuring Olga's likeness were generated and posted to Chinese social media apps Xiaohongshu and Bilibili, which are the Chinese equivalents of Instagram and YouTube.

• Despite China's efforts to regulate AI and protect likeness rights, experts suggest that accounts promoting government-aligned narratives may face selective enforcement, highlighting the challenges of regulating an industry that's evolving at breakneck speed.

What makes this story even more maddening is putting yourself in Olga's shoes as a Ukrainian whose likeness was co-opted to promote Russian-Chinese narratives – all while her homeland is embroiled in a devastating war with Russia. The frustration of having her face and voice misappropriated is bad enough on its own, but then portraying her as a Russian propagandist has got to be extra frustrating.

🤖📝 New AI Report Reveals Surprising Findings

A recent report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford has revealed some eye-opening statistics. The report was based on a survey conducted by YouGov that took place between the 28th of March and the 30th of April 2024. The countries surveyed were Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK, and USA, with approximately 2,000 participants in each country.

• A sizable minority of the respondents – between 19% in Japan and 30% in the UK – have not heard about any of the most popular AI tools (including ChatGPT).

• ChatGPT was shown to be the most popular tool in all countries, but it’s still not as popular as you might think it is. The youngest age group (18 - 24) use it the most often, but even among that cohort, only 9% use it daily. From the oldest age group (55+), only 16% have used it, with a mere 1% saying they use it daily.

• As far as AI’s impact on society and their personal lives, on average, respondents were more optimistic about its impact on them personally, but slightly more pessimistic about its effects on society overall. However, not all countries fit this pattern. For example, the French and the Brits were pessimistic about both, while the Americans, Argentinians, and Japanese were optimistic about both.

For those who work in tech or tech-adjacent fields, the data from this report can be quite surprising. We’ve all been bombarded by AI content for more than a year now, which has probably skewed our perception of how popular AI tools actually are. It turns out that among the general population - at least according to this survey - AI isn’t quite as popular as it seems to be for us tech folk.

💻👃 Is The World Ready for a “SmellGPT?”

Your smartphone can already see and hear the world around you, but what if it could smell it too? Sounds like sci-fi, right? Well, hold on to your nose, because that’s exactly where technology is headed.

• The process of trying to create a “SmellGPT” has been challenging for several reasons. One of those reasons is lack of publicly available data. Machine learning models that have been used to create AI tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney were able to scrape the entire internet to create a foundational knowledge set. There’s no equivalent “internet of odors” available for olfactory learning models.

• As a solution to this problem, enthusiastic researchers launched the DREAM Olfaction Prediction Challenge in 2015. They released previously collected odor data and invited teams from around the world to submit their machine learning models. The models had to predict odor labels like “sweet,” “flower” or “fruit” for odor-causing compounds based on their molecular structure.

• Within four years, the largest olfactory datasets grew from less than 500 molecules submitted as part of the DREAM challenge, to about 5,000 molecules. In addition, a Google research team began applying deep learning techniques to machine olfaction. This significantly sped up the pace of progress.

As the field of machine olfaction continues to advance, it's clear that the future smells sweet (or maybe savory? musky perhaps? 🤔). Some of the likely outcomes we’ll see from this research include personalized perfumes, better insect repellents, and maybe even scent-based disease detection gadgets.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• A recent Google leak has revealed a lot of insightful information about how their proprietary search algorithm works. Two SEO professionals have reviewed the details of the leak. You can check them out here and here.

• What do the pyramids, the oceans, the blood of newborns, and human and canine testicles all have in common? Let’s just say that it’s not a good thing.

• The world's first human trial of a drug that can regenerate teeth will begin in a few months, less than a year on from news of its success in animals.

• A man forgot the password to his crypto wallet 11 years ago. At the time, his Bitcoin was worth somewhere between $3,000 - $4,000 USD. Since then, the value of his wallet has swelled to $3 million. So he decided to enlist the help of hackers to help him get back in.

• Conventional satellites are mainly composed of metals and some plastic. A team of Japanese scientists just changed the game by building the world's first wooden satellite. They call it LignoSat.

• The hacking group ShinyHunters has been on a massive data theft spree lately. Among their victims have been 30 million customers of Santander Bank, and 560 million users of the TicketMaster service.

• An international trial found that patients who had lost some or all use of their hands and arms after a spinal cord injury regained strength, control and sensation after using a new device called Arc-Ex.

• 📽️🎞️ CETI is a listening project that has been using advanced machine learning to understand what sperm whales are saying. The ultimate goal is to translate whale-speak and to be able to communicate with them in their own language.

• Did you know that hosting giants Bluehost and Hostgator are owned by the same parent company? That same company also owns the famous Yoast SEO WordPress plugin and more than a dozen other web businesses. Learn about the fascinating world of mergers and acquisitions in the web industry.

• Stack Overflow is running their annual developer survey if you’d like to add your two cents. Entries are being accepted until June 7th.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day."

– Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, from a long, but highly thoughtful read (if you care about the internet).

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 91% was the size of the traffic drop that HouseFresh, an air purifier review website, experienced after Google’s recent algorithm updates. They went from getting about 4,000 daily visitors in October 2023 to about 200 by the end of April 2024. Ouch!

• $1,400,000,000 USD is the estimated valuation of eFishery, an Indonesian seafood farming tech startup. It was founded in 2013 by a former catfish farmer who had built his own automated feeder to overcome a common problem – the over and under feeding of fish. From those humble beginnings, his business has skyrocketed to around 200,000 aqua-farmers using his technology.

• 47,000,000 is how many times the viral “All Eyes on Rafah” image was shared on Instagram in only 2 days. By the time you read this, it will likely surpass 50 million. Experts from around the world have shared their thoughts on how the AI-generated image was able to go so viral, so quickly.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

Last issue’s JavaScript winner was Tanja Klopper. Congrats Tanja! Several others also sent messages with the correct answer, which was that response.json was referenced without calling it as a function. Nicely done everyone. 👏🏻

Let’s do another Python one for this issue:

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

VitePress: VitePress is a static site generator designed to build fast, content-centric websites. In short, VitePress takes your source content written in Markdown, applies a theme to it, and generates static HTML pages that can be easily deployed anywhere (e.g., Cloudflare Pages)

https://vitepress.dev/

All Boiler Plates: If you’re planning on building an app or a piece of software and you want to save some serious time, then this directory is a gold mine of resources. It has a default layout you can browse, but it also includes two search filters so you can organize everything by either a specific anchor technology or by features.

https://allboilerplates.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The above is a side-by-side comparison of the same written text. One side was handwritten in cursive by Amy Goodchild. The other side was typed in her custom-made cursive font that she created using p5.js.

Creating a custom font is one thing, but creating a custom cursive font is much more challenging. As opposed to regular font, where each letter stands on its own next to other letters, cursive handwriting weaves from one letter to the next. This means that you not only have to create the 26 letters of the alphabet, but you also have to map out the various connections between letters. It’s a time consuming process, but the end result is really cool.

As someone who’s been lamenting the gradual loss of cursive handwriting that’s been happening over the past few decades, I really appreciate Amy’s experiment and her write up describing the process.

💬 What’s the Word?

Sprezzatura (Italian) is an Italian word that roughly means to display effortless mastery and make the difficult look easy.

This month, embrace the spirit of sprezzatura in your work. Whether you’re coding with nonchalant mastery or designing interfaces that radiate elegant ease, let sprezzatura guide you in making your work appear stunningly simple.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

We only saw each other two weeks ago and already so much has happened since then. Open AI released a new GPT version, Google has started unrolling AI-driven search results, and lots more. And of course those are only the big news stories, but if you’ve been following us for a bit, then you know that we also love to dig up interesting news that maybe didn’t make it on your radar. For this issue, we’ve got the following:

• 💰⏱️ $25 Million Heist Pulled Off in 12 Seconds by MIT Students

• 🍜🖥️ NYC Restaurant Hires Remote Cashiers From Philippines to Take Orders

• 📱☹️ Phones Can Now Tell If Their Owners Are Depressed

Plus we’ve got the usual lineup of tools, stats, another code conundrum challenge, and more.

Let’s get into it!

📰 From the Newsroom

💰⏱️ $25 Million Heist Pulled Off in 12 Seconds by MIT Students

I was originally going to put this story in the “Numbers Game” section of this issue because “$25 million in 12 seconds” is such an attention-grabbing numerical pairing, but the entire backstory is just too good to not give it a more in-depth look. Everything from how they planned it to how they (surprisingly) got caught is entertaining enough to be turned into a movie at some point (à la 21).

• Two brothers studying computer science and math at MIT are accused of stealing $25 million in cryptocurrency in just 12 seconds by exploiting a bug in the Ethereum blockchain protocol.

• The scheme allegedly involved setting up fake validator nodes to tamper with pending transactions before they were added to the blockchain, reordering them to their advantage.

• The brothers face decades in prison for wire fraud and money laundering charges related to this sophisticated theft that the DOJ says "calls the very integrity of the blockchain into question."

Perhaps the most mind-boggling part of this sophisticated crypto heist is how the perpetrators were caught. The level of skill and intellect to exploit an intricate blockchain vulnerability in a mere 12 seconds is something few posses, and yet they somehow forgot to use a TOR browser or a VPN when researching how to "wash crypto" and how to avoid financial KYC requirements. Instead, their publicly-logged browser histories contained damning searches about top crypto lawyers and extradition policies. So smart…and yet so dumb at the same time.

🍜🖥️ NYC Restaurant Hires Remote Cashiers From Philippines to Take Orders

Sansan Chicken, a fried chicken chain with locations in Manhattan and Queens, has implemented a novel approach to staffing its cashiers - outsourcing the roles to remote workers in the Philippines through a company called Happy Cashier.

• This setup allows the restaurants to significantly reduce labor costs by employing workers from a country where the average cashier makes $1 per hour. Sansan Chicken pays them $3 per hour.

• While the virtual Filipino cashiers provide more personalized service than self-service kiosks, some patrons feel the lack of physical human interaction detracts from the authentic dining experience. Not to mention the ethical concerns about displacing local workers who would normally be doing those jobs.

• While Sansan Chicken’s unique remote work model is a bit of a novelty at the moment, it does hint at an increasingly automated future for the service industry. Many people have commented that it’s not too difficult to envision virtual AI bots eventually replacing human workers altogether for roles like taking orders.

This story made me reflect back to a few years ago when I worked with a fully remote company and one of my colleagues, who was Filipino, revealed her salary to me. At first I was angry on her behalf that she was being so underpaid…until she informed me that by her local standards she was making good money. It brings up a larger conversation that’s been the topic of discussion across labor markets for quite a while, but really picked up steam during the lockdowns when remote work took off:

*By company’s domestic rates, I mean if there is a German company hiring remote workers internationally, then they will pay their remote colleagues within the typical German salary range for their position - irrespective of where they live.

📱☹️ Phones Can Now Tell If Their Owners Are Depressed

Has this ever happened to you:

You’re having a conversation with a friend on your phone - whether through text, voice, or voice message - and you mention some specific life event or problem and then shortly afterwards you start getting targeted ads for products or services related to your conversation? Well, it turns out that not only can your phone decipher that you might want to buy something, it can also determine if you’re depressed or not.

• New AI-powered apps can potentially detect signs of depression by analyzing data from your smartphone like selfies, social media usage, sleep patterns, etc. Early research shows reasonable accuracy.

• However, these mental health apps raise privacy concerns - there's little regulation around how personal data is collected, shared, and used by companies. Users may not fully understand the terms.

• While promising for increasing access to mental health care - which is good on the surface - the apps can't replace human connection. Plus there are risks if the technology makes mistakes or companies mishandle sensitive data.

As these AI-driven mental health technologies advance, we must grapple with profound questions. How much are we willing to sacrifice privacy for increased access and early intervention? Can we trust companies and developers to uphold ethical standards with such personal data? One sobering example is Meta's 2018 algorithm scandal, which scanned WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for suicide risk, triggering over 1,000 non-consensual wellness checks by police. While well-intentioned, it clearly overstepped the bounds of privacy.

⛓️ Ten More Must See Links of the Month

• A British toddler has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a pioneering gene therapy trial, in a development that doctors say marks a new era in treating deafness.

• Is Google abusing its search engine dominance to stifle Gmail competitors in search results? That’s what Tuta (formerly Tutanota) mail is claiming. They filed an official complaint with the E.U. after Google dropped visibility of Tuta(nota) by 90% in its search results.

• The Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 are two recently launched AI devices surrounded by a lot of hype. But is the hype worth it? This writer delivers a scathing - at times humorous - answer and argues that they will never be good.

• HTMX is a trending JavaScript library and it seems like everyone in the dev world is talking about it lately. Check out its pros and cons, based on over 1,000 reviews scraped from Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, and YouTube.

• If you’ve used Google at all these past few days then you might’ve noticed that they’ve started integrating AI responses in search results. If you’re not a fan of it and prefer the now “old school” results layout, then you can try this workaround.

• A tech company called Beaverlab has launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for a super-telephoto camera that comes with a 400-mm zoom lens, and works with a smartphone to capture distant imagery. Their original Kickstarter goal was $20,000. As of the time of this writing, they’ve gotten $1,004,447 in pledges!

• The first ever retail sales of no-kill, lab-grown meat have begun in Singapore. The company making the meat is called GOOD Meat and the butcher selling it is called Huber’s. A 120 gram pack goes for $7.20 SGD, which is roughly $5.35 USD.

• 📽️🎞️ Last week, OpenAI released it’s latest GPT iteration - GPT-4o - to the public. It’s free. It’s fast. And it can do a lot of cool things. Check out the sample use case videos in this Twitter thread for examples.

• A team of scientists has created a 3D, nanoscale-resolution map of a single cubic millimeter of the human brain. Although the map covers just a a teensy, minuscule fraction of a full brain, it still contains roughly 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and nearly 150 million synapses. It’s currently the highest-resolution image of the human brain ever created.

• Who’s the fastest WordPress hosting provider out there? Well, if you ask any of the dozens of hosting companies out there, they’ll all probably give you a convoluted roundabout response that amounts to “we are,” but here’s the real data-backed answer.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."

– Albert Einstein (supposedly)

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 9% of annual work time is spent reorienting after switching applications, according to a study conducted on 137 users from three Fortune 500 companies. The research used a work graph to measure cognitive effort and found that users toggled between apps nearly 1,200 times daily, costing over two seconds each switch. This resulted in nearly four hours per week spent just reorienting.

• 60.28% of all website traffic comes from people using mobile devices (as of last month). For comparison, back in 2011, it was a mere 6.1%. That’s a ten-fold increase in about 13 years.

• 2.6 hours of work and 9 hours of sleep define the "global human day," according to a 2023 study by researchers from McGill University. Their analysis aggregated data from 145 countries, collected between 2000 and 2019. They aimed to provide a comprehensive estimate of human activities averaged over time and across the entire population (including all age groups, income levels, etc).

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

The winner of last issue’s Ruby on Rails challenge was…no one. I guess we don’t have too many Ruby fans in our community. For the record, the subtle error was the absence of the new action. In the create action, if user.save returns false, it renders the 'new' view, but the 'new' action is not defined in the controller. Therefore, it would result in a routing error when attempting to render the 'new' view.

Let’s bring the conundrum back to JavaScript since you all seemed to enjoy that a lot more.

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Google Labs: In issue 152 we told you about Google’s AI Test Kitchen, but Google also has another similar platform called Google Labs. The difference between them is that Labs is a broader platform that highlights Google's AI efforts across products, while the Test Kitchen is more narrowly focused on just three specific AI tools (with a wait list for a fourth). Anyway, Labs has some really cool toys you can play with. Check it out!

https://labs.google/

Storm: This experimental AI is still in its research phase and free to use. Think of it like your personal Wikipedia page generator. If you’re interested in some topic and would like an informational report on it, STORM will do it for you. It’ll also cite all of its sources and link to them so you can always check the claims being made in the report.

https://storm.genie.stanford.edu/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

The large, glowing circular contraption that you’re seeing above is a “portal” between Dublin, Ireland and New York City, USA. One of these was placed in both cities, and connected them via a 24/7 live stream. Sounds like a cool idea, right? A wholesome way to bring people closer together. Well, there’s the theory and there’s the practice.

In practice, the organization behind the portals had to temporarily shut them down after some New Yorkers and Dubliners started flashing their butts at each other, an OnlyFans model on the NYC side gave the good citizens of Dublin a “free preview” of her adult content, and one Dubliner taunted New Yorkers with images of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Uh, humans…

💬 What’s the Word?

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese concept that embodies the idea of finding a deep sense of purpose or meaning in life. The term combines the words "iki" (生き), meaning life, and "gai" (甲斐), which refers to value or worth. Together, they convey the notion of what makes life worth living.

Tech professionals who discover their ikigai are those who find joy in their work, leverage their unique skills, address significant problems, and receive fair compensation. When tech companies support their employees in finding their ikigai, they create an environment where creativity and productivity thrive, ultimately leading to groundbreaking advancements and a positive impact on society.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

Is it really May already? My oh my, the time is flying by. In this edition of your favorite quirky tech newsletter, we’ve got the following headline stories for you:

• 🧑‍🚀🚀 Humanity Has Entered the 3rd Space Age

• 🕵️‍♂️🦹‍♂️ Professional Fraud Fighter Goes Undercover at a “Yahoo Boys School”

• 🤖🎶 The AI Music App That Actually Makes Good Music

Plus, we’ve got a cool new tool for WordPress users, a great (free) beginner’s course for aspiring front-end web developers, another code conundrum, and more.

Let’s get into it!

📰 From the Newsroom

🧑‍🚀🚀 Humanity Has Entered the 3rd Space Age

Last year, there were a record-breaking 211 successful space launches. The previous record was set the year before that, and the previous one to that one, the year before that. This upward trend is largely due to a shift that’s taken place in the 21st century. While in the 20th century space exploration was dominated by government funding - initially only by two nations, the U.S. and the Soviet Union - nowadays private companies have overtaken governments as the main drivers of innovation.

• Technological advancements, particularly in reusable rocket technology, have significantly reduced the cost of space travel, paving the way for unprecedented exploration beyond Earth's orbit.

• In the past few years, some space-related businesses have even started to generate a profit. Most of it has come from sending up communication satellites, especially broadband internet.

• Many estimates suggest the global space industry could generate revenues of more than one trillion USD within the next two decades. If that ends up being true and even a portion of it is spent on research and development (which I’m sure it will be), then we may all bear witness to some interesting developments.

Much like with all of the other technological advancements that are simultaneously happening, it’s going to be fascinating to see what will result from all this space exploration. I imagine it’s possible that children being born now may witness the first human colony outside of Earth being established somewhere. It might seem farfetched, but no more farfetched than video calls on mobile devices being a part of daily life when I was born.

🕵️‍♂️🦹‍♂️ Professional Fraud Fighter Goes Undercover at a “Yahoo Boys School”

Frank McKenna is a career fraud analyst and investigator with over 30 years of experience. He recently decided to do a little research into what goes on at “Yahoo Boy Universities.” These are essentially informal education camps, largely based in Nigeria, that teach “students” how to run scams using modern communication tools and social media. During the course of his research, he learned ten fascinating things about how they operate. Here are three that stood out:

• The ringleaders or “professors” of these groups target young people - often students - to join their ranks. They even offer small cash incentives to simply reach out to them to ask for more information about their training programs.

• The primary tool of choice that the Yahoo Boys have been relying on lately is deepfake video. After building up a rapport with target victims - who they refer to as “clients” - they shift their communication to video calls to solidify their victims trust. Except that the video calls are manipulated using face-swapping apps and similar tools to create the illusion that the victim is talking to the fabricated persona. This was also recently reported on in a separate article on WIRED.

• Besides their primary source of income of scamming people, Yahoo Boys also sell complete packages of stolen images, and deepfake audio and video that can be used to fool victims. It’s like a form of multi-level marketing within the online fraud world.

In the past, I’ve personally found these types of scamming attempts to be so poorly executed that I never understood how someone could fall for them. However, with all of the advancements in AI tech, they are becoming harder to detect. Poor grammar and spelling mistakes have been solved by ChatGPT and similar tools, and now even video calls and voice calls are being manipulated. Stay safe out there folks.

🤖🎶 The AI Music App That Actually Makes Good Music

I’ve tried a few different AI music generators over the last few months. While some were able to produce some decent-to-good instrumentals, I had yet to come across one that made genuinely good complete music, including vocals - until now. After trying Suno and being absolutely blown away at how good it is, I went and dug up the backstory behind it so I could feature it here.

• The app takes a token-based approach similar to language models like ChatGPT. However, audio data not only requires processing more data points per second compared to text, but also deals with the complexity of these data points being a continuous signal, rather than discrete tokens (as in text). In simple terms, the reason why it’s been so much harder to make an impressive AI music generator is that it’s way more complex than dealing with text.

• Luckily, the folks behind the project have a professional pedigree that’s up for the task. The team who created it is a blend of musicians and AI experts based in Cambridge, MA and its founding members previously worked at Meta, TikTok and Kensho.

• On the legal front, the company remains secretive about the specific data fueling their model, which notably includes human speech to enhance the realism of generated vocals.

As I mentioned, I tried using Suno, and just as the writer of the RollingStones article I linked to above found himself saying that the song he generated was “the most powerful and unsettling AI creation [he’s] encountered in any medium,” I too was blown away. Below is one of the songs I generated with Suno, using this simple prompt:

90's hip-hop with jazzy instrumental. The subject matter should be about front-end web development.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• Last Thursday marked the 60th anniversary of BASIC, a programming language that started at Dartmouth College. BASIC played a pivotal role in democratizing computing and shaping the landscape of modern programming languages.

• You’ve likely heard of large language models (LLMs) - they’re the backbone of AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, but Microsoft has been quietly working on a series of small language models (SLMs) with some interesting applications. At the end of last month they released one of them: Phi-3-mini.

• Festo, a German company specializing in developing bionic flying objects, has unveiled an ultra-light, delicately designed fleet of robotic bees. Named BionicBee, they are part of the automation company’s Bionic Learning Network (BLN), which is known for developing products inspired by nature.

• Last month, more than half a million fast-food workers in California got a raise, with minimum wage bumped up to $20 per hour. That same week, the self-proclaimed “world’s first fully autonomous restaurant” opened its doors for business in Pasadena. This has turned California into ground zero for the battle between fast-food worker labor rights versus robotic automation.

• Scientists in the Netherlands launched a “Martian farm" to simulate growing conditions on the red planet. They then implemented a unique agricultural technique to boost yields of certain crops. In the future they hope to create a 100% self-sustainable system, using resources only available on Mars.

• Last year, Amazon launched a beta tool that let self-published authors generate AI "virtual voice" narrations of their ebooks. Since the launch, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible, Amazon's audiobook platform.

• A biological event that last occurred in 1803 is about to happen again. It will only last a few weeks, but the ripple effects from it will be felt in America’s forests for years to come.

• 📽️🎞️ Is it possible to build a functioning WordPress plugin using ChatGPT? Matt Cromwell of StellarWP did just that. He breaks down his process in this video. He also shared a blog post that provides additional insight about his experience.

• If you use JavaScript in your work and you want to enhance your web applications, then you need to check out these ten best practices.

• AI has changed the internet in a lot of ways. Some good. Some bad. Here is an interesting roundup of 12 web developers sharing how they’ve integrated AI tools into their workflows. Check it out and drop a comment to share how you’re using AI.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"This is, I believe, the Oppenheimer moment of our generation."

– Alexander Schallenberg, Austria’s foreign minister (said at the start of the Vienna conference entitled 'Humanity at the Crossroads: Autonomous Weapons Systems and the Challenge of Regulation')

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 49.6% of all internet traffic last year originated from bots. That’s up 2% in comparison with the previous year, and is the highest number ever seen since this data started being tracked in 2013.

• 3,900 years ago is approximately when the first recorded instance of encryption was discovered in Menet Khufu, Egypt. Researchers uncovered “password” inscriptions inside the tomb of Khnumhotep II. The inscriptions used a hieroglyphic substitution method to conceal hidden messages.

• 20% of Australian workers who were surveyed would be willing to sacrifice between 16% and 33% of their salaries for the right to work from home. Middle and high-income earners in white-collar “knowledge economy” jobs were the most likely to value working from home. They were willing to forgo $12,000 to $24,000 AUD of their annual salary to have the ability to do it some of the time.

• 96% of transactions in India were conducted using cash in 2016. Contrast that to today, where the Indian government claims that more digital transactions are completed in India than in any other country in the world. To put a number on it, last year India recorded more than 100 billion digital transactions.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

The winner of last issue’s JavaScript challenge was Bill Hall. Bill’s side project is Rose Ministries. In terms of the solution, there was actually more than one, depending on how you chose to handle the variable declarations and operations. The main problem was the dot in between total and Sum. The code had total.Sum when it should’ve just read as totalSum in all instances.

The next challenge is below - this is a Ruby on Rails one:

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Hyve: If your website runs on WordPress and you’ve got a library of information spread out across multiple pages and posts then Hyve is your new best friend. It’s an AI-powered chatbot plugin that you can load up with approximately 100 posts that have an average of 1500 words per post. Think of it as your private chatbot’s “training data.” If one of your site visitors has a question about any of the information found within this training data, Hyve can access it and provide the information to the person in a natural, conversational way.

https://themeisle.com/plugins/hyve/

Front-End Development Bootcamp: Want to start a career in front-end development or perhaps refresh yourself on its fundamental concepts? Do you have 21 hours and 6 minutes to spare? If you answered yes to both questions, then this bootcamp is for you. It covers what you’d expect it to cover: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’ll also learn about GitHub pages and complete several projects to test your skills. Did I mention that it’s 100% free?

https://frontendmasters.com/bootcamp/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Wanna make a lot of money?

Then do what the founders of Jolie did - figure out a way to take a normal, inexpensive thing, and make it a bougie, exclusive thing.

Jolie sells showerheads for a whopping $165 (or $148 if you join their subscription service).

The company has sold more than 200,000 units to date and in 2023 they brought in $28 million in revenue with no venture funding.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Fernweh" is a German term that translates to a far-reaching ache for distant places, reflecting a deep-seated yearning to travel or explore unfamiliar territories. Unlike simple wanderlust, which implies a general desire to travel, fernweh suggests a profound, almost painful longing for places one has never seen, stirring a powerful emotional response.

In terms of tech, while not directly related to the nature of tech work itself, it does apply to the growing digital nomad community - of which tech workers are a major part. One could argue that digital nomads all suffer from a case of fernweh.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

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Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

Welcome to the second of two April editions of Bizarro Devs. We’ve got a special one for you today, with some unique elements thrown into the mix. One of these is a reader-submitted story, which you’ll find in our top ten links. It comes from one of our long-time subscribers who unlocked the tier two referral reward. We also have the winner of the code conundrum challenge (plus a new challenge), and of course you’ve got the usual lineup of interesting and quirky stories, useful tools, etc. With that said, let’s kick things off with our headliners:

• 🧑‍🍳🍺 The Mashup You Didn’t Know You Needed: AI x Beer

• 🧑‍💻🔌 WordPress Plugin Developer Faces Backlash for Anti-Piracy Tactic

• 🤖🪖 DALL E-3: Innocent Image Generator or Battlefield Tool?

Let’s get into it!

📰 From the Newsroom

🧑‍🍳🍺 The Mashup You Didn’t Know You Needed: AI x Beer

Yup, you read that correctly. Artificial intelligence has now ventured into the world of brewing. Researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium have developed an AI system that can predict and enhance how much people will enjoy a beer. This beer-gorithm suggests modifications to beer recipes and has proven its effectiveness in blind taste tests.

• Just as LLMs like ChatGPT have training data that form the basis of their abilities, so too, does the Beer AI. Its training data is based on an analysis of over 200 chemical properties of various beers.

• This training data is used to predict taste preferences and make suggestions to improve existing brewing recipes. The approach provides brewers with a scientific basis to enhance flavor and enjoyment.

• In practical tests, beers modified based on suggestions from the beer-gorithm were preferred in blind taste tests, validating the AI's predictive capabilities and its practical utility in improving beer quality.

All of this is well and good, but I think the true final test for this Beer AI - if it wants to prove how powerful it really is - is to see if it can get people to like non-alcoholic beers. Non-alcoholic beers typically don’t score that well in taste tests so it would be interesting to see if the AI could do anything about it.

🧑‍💻🔌 WordPress Plugin Developer Faces Backlash for Anti-Piracy Tactic

As someone who works for a WordPress-focused company, I definitely feel some type of way about people who use pirated versions of plugins. I know how hard my colleagues work to develop the plugins that we have for the community and when someone takes it upon themselves to pirate our stuff…well, let me remain civil here. I’ll just say that I can certainly empathize with developers wanting to combat piracy, but how you go about it is also important. Here are the details of what happened:

• An add-on plugin for a widely-used WordPress site builder installed a secret anti-piracy script into the plugin.

• It was designed to punish users using pirated versions of the plugin by hiding or deleting all posts on their website. The tactic sparked outrage, as it was seen as invasive and harmful, even to legitimate users.

• The developer behind this controversial move issued a now-deleted public apology, admitting the approach was misguided and caused unnecessary harm.

This is a classic tale of good intentions, but with poor execution. The backlash the developer faced brought up serious discussions about legality, with concerns that such actions could lead to hefty fines or even jail time under laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the U.S. To be fair, there were some supporters of the tactic as well, and there is an ongoing debate within the Facebook group about it. What do you think?

🤖🪖 DALL E-3: Innocent Image Generator or Battlefield Tool?

As an indirect followup to the story we covered in our last issue about the future of AI-powered drones in warfare, it’s now been revealed that Microsoft approached the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) in October of last year, to pitch them the idea of using the Azure version of OpenAI's DALL-E image generator as a tool for battlefield applications.

• In a presentation to the DoD, Microsoft suggested that DALL-E could be used to generate images for training battle management systems, showcasing how generative AI could enhance military decision-making and operational readiness.

• Initially, OpenAI prohibited the use of its technologies for military purposes. However, changes in policy and recent engagements with the Pentagon suggest a shift towards exploring national security applications, highlighting a potential departure from its original mission of "benefiting all humanity."

• The use of AI in military applications is not isolated to the U.S. As we mentioned in our previous issue, Israel's AI-driven "kill list" and the development of AI drones by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt illustrate a broader global trend of weaponizing artificial intelligence.

Beyond the obvious implications that this story has about the increasing use of AI for military purposes, is the fact that tech companies continue to adjust their policies to whatever happens to suit them in the moment. Remember when Google removed "don’t be evil" from their code of conduct? However, it’s worth mentioning that sometimes, if there’s enough public pressure, companies will also bend in the anti-dystopian direction - as was the case with Amazon not too long ago.

⛓️ Ten More Must See Links of the Month

• ⭐ A big thank you to our longtime reader, Phil Paoletta, who has referred enough new readers to us to qualify for the second-tier referral reward: a featured post in our top ten links. Phil chose to submit a unique story about "Postcards from Timbuktu," a site that offers handwritten postcards from Timbuktu (yes, that Timbuktu). The postcards provide a critical source of income for out-of-work tour guides while offering a unique item to you. ⭐

• In the latest fascinating use of AI, conservation officials from the Bailiwick of Guernsey have been mapping out a "bat language," which they say will help them make crucial, evidence-based decisions about the environment. If you happen to live on the island, you can volunteer to help with the project.

• Researchers from the Quantum Machines Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan have invented "gravity-free" graphite. In a demo, they showed a small piece of this graphite levitating above a grid of magnets.

• The youngest branch of the U.S. military - the Space Force - announced last week that they are partnering with two companies for a first-of-its-kind mission to demonstrate how the U.S. military might respond to an "on-orbit aggression."

• We’re all fairly used to flying drones at this point, but what about underwater drones? American weapons manufacturer Northrop Grumman has just completed developing the Manta Ray, an autonomous underwater drone developed for military use.

• Former Amazon senior security engineer, Shakeeb Ahmed, made history last week. He was the first person ever to be convicted and sentenced to prison for hacking a smart contract. Using his professional skills, Ahmed stole more than $12 million USD in two separate attacks on cryptocurrency exchanges.

• AI image generators, ranging from MidJourney to DALL E-3, have been struggling with generating accurate images of what seem like simple prompts. In a series of experiments, a request to create an image of an "Asian man and white wife" left much to be desired. None of the companies responded to a request for comment.

• 📽️🎞️ Figure dubs itself as an AI robotics company building the world's first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot. They recently released a ~2.5 minute demo video showing how far along they are in their latest iteration. Aside from some slight delays in response time, it’s impressive to watch.

• If you’d like to launch a website for testing purposes but don’t want to spend money on a domain name, then you’ll be happy to know that contrary to popular belief, it is possible to get a free domain for testing.

• Have you ever tried to install WordPress on a Raspberry Pi? It’s not the most common WordPress setup, but it is possible. Check out this step-by-step write up of how to do it. Plus get a breakdown of why you’d even want to do it in the first place.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"I mean, I'm not deleting my mom."

– Noor Siddiqui, founder of a eugenic reproductive startup called Orchid, when asked about the startup's origin story — her mother's diagnosis with retinitis pigmentosa, which made her legally blind.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 8 minutes and 20 seconds is the average time it takes for sunlight to travel from the Sun to the Earth. This means that if the sun were to all of a sudden “turn off,” we wouldn’t realize it here on Earth until about 8 minutes later.

• 13 is the new minimum age to use WhatsApp in the U.K. and E.U., which was lowered from 16. The change took effect last week and sparked a backlash from child safety advocates who accuse Meta of prioritizing profits over protection.

• 9 days is how long it recently took for a New York jury to find Terraform Labs and its former CEO, Do Kwon, liable for defrauding investors.

• $195 USD is the fee MJ Wolfe charges for a one-minute faux-podcast advertisement. These ads feature Wolfe mimicking a podcast setup to subtly promote products, giving the impression of a casual yet authoritative endorsement. He makes between $9,000 to $16,000 per month from them.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

The winner of last issue’s Python challenge was Charles-Antoine Poirier. If you speak French, check out his website. Thanks to all who participated and congrats again to Charles-Antoine for the fastest correct response. Speaking of the correct response, the error was in the save.resized_image line. It should’ve been resized_image.save.

The next challenge is below - this time a JavaScript one:

The snippet contains a fundamental syntax error related to how variables are declared and accessed. Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Faces.js: This JavaScript library lets you generate vector-based cartoon faces, similar to those created by the Nintendo Wii's Mii system. It uses SVG to render each face, which can be customized or randomly generated through the library. Each face is represented by a JavaScript object, allowing you to store and recreate faces consistently. You can add the library to your projects using npm or yarn, and integrate it into your applications with minimal code.

https://zengm.com/facesjs/

Samba CoE v0.2: Tired of the response lag you sometimes get with LLMs like ChatGPT? With Samba, it’s virtually non-existent. It fires responses at you like a supersonic Mach-3 engine. I’m talking under one second almost every single time. It even provides a pop-up window with each response that tells you how long it took for the system to process it and how many tokens were generated on a per-second basis to generate it. Check it out!

https://coe-1.cloud.snova.ai/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

What in the world is this thing?

In the simplest sense, it's a small metal plate, about 7 x 11 inches (about 18 x 28 centimeters) in size. In the center, it has an icon which represents the American Sign Language symbol for "water.” Emanating from the icon, are sound waves that also represent the word "water," as spoken in 103 different languages. On the other side of the plate, there is a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

Cool, but what’s it all for?

It’s for the aliens. This special plate is going to accompany NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft on its journey to Jupiter's icy moon Europa in October 2024.

💬 One More Word for the Month

"Saudade" is a Portuguese word expressing a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something or someone absent, often with a profound recognition that this absence is permanent. The term conveys a mixed feeling of loss, love, and melancholy, combined with the recognition of something forever lost to time. The closest English equivalent is nostalgia, but saudade is a more profound and encompassing emotional feeling than nostalgia.

We can apply this concept to the rapid evolution of technology, especially as it relates to the web and artificial intelligence. As AI and the algorithm-driven internet continue to reshape our digital experiences, many of us who are older sometimes feel a sense of saudade for the simpler, less algorithm-driven days of exploring the web and communicating online.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

Welcome to the first of two April editions of Bizarro Devs. As usual, we’ve got a nice lineup of stories that touch upon a variety of brain-tickling topics. There’s a recent cybercrime tale out of Hong Kong, an article that looks ahead to what humanity might be facing in the near future, and finally, a fun post that will make you reflect on some unique, unexplained mysteries. Of course we also have the usual mix of tools, stats, and a new code-related challenge for the Python lovers out there.

Below are the top stories:

• 🦹💸 Multinational Firm Loses $25 Million in Deepfake Scam

• 🤖🪖 Swarms of AI Killer Robots Are the Future of War

• 🤔💭 17 Mysteries That Researchers Still Haven’t Solved

Let’s get started!

📰 From the Newsroom

🦹💸 Multinational Firm Loses $25 Million in Deepfake Scam

Imagine being the employee responsible for losing $25 million dollars? That’s gotta take a psychological toll on anybody. The thing is, with the rise of deepfake technology and its increasingly higher level of sophistication, it could happen to anybody. In this particular situation, it happened to a finance worker in Hong Kong. Here’s how it went down:

• The elaborate heist began when the employee received a message that was supposedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. The message mentioned the need for a “secret transaction” to be carried out. This initially made the worker think it was a phishing email.

• Phase two of the scam is when the deepfake technology came into play. The fraudsters correctly predicted he would be suspicious of the request, so they leveraged his co-workers to assuage his doubts.

• He was invited to attend a video call with his colleagues to discuss the transfer - except that unbeknownst to him, all of his colleagues were, in fact, AI-generated simulations. Believing everyone else on the call was real, the employee ended up transferring a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million USD.

Reading this story made me feel a lot of sympathy for this person. It also made me reflect on how much crazier things are going to get with these deepfakes, and how it mirrors what’s been happening with AI-generated text content. ChatGPT (and similar competitors) aren’t even two years old yet, and we’re already drowning in a sea of their output. It feels like at some point all of the tech we use is just going to dissolve into a pile of AI mush. I think we should start a new slogan: make tech human again.

🤖🪖 Swarms of AI Killer Robots Are the Future of War

Drones of all kinds are now a very active part of modern warfare. Despite their variety, almost all of them have one thing in common: they’re controlled by humans. A notable exception is Israel’s drones. Although a human does still make the final attack decision, the Israelis have begun relying on AI to tell them which targets to strike. Author and professor, Michael T. Klare, argues that Israel’s approach is going to be adopted by other militaries, with increasingly more agency being given to the AI.

• Klare states that given the work on artificial intelligence and robot weaponry that the major powers have already begun, that in the future we’ll see an array of self-guided autonomous weapons systems. Essentially, these will be combat drones capable of applying lethal force independently of any human oversight.

• In a nod to the global concern over this, the U.N. General Assembly held its first discussion about autonomous weapons last October, and it’s planning a full-scale review of the topic this coming fall. The primary concern is whether these machines will be empowered to take a human life without human oversight.

• Military strategists, particularly those in the U.S., disregard these concerns and are pushing ahead for a future where they envision “swarms” of AI-powered killing machines making real-time battlefield decisions by coordinating with each other in an algorithmic network that’s outside the bounds of human processing capability.

Last year, Antony Loewenstein, an independent journalist, best-selling author, and filmmaker released a book titled “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World” where he describes how Israel’s weapons and technology manufacturers use the Palestinian Territories as testing grounds for their weaponry and spying gadgets so they can then market them around the world as “battle tested.” If Gaza is a compartmentalized glimpse of what’s in store for the rest of humanity, then we should all be concerned.

🤔💭 17 Mysteries That Researchers Still Haven’t Solved

Scientific research has enabled us to understand a lot about the world around us, ourselves, other animals, plants of all kinds, and more. However, as much as we’ve learned, there are still those lingering “mysteries of the universe” that keep us searching for answers. This roundup includes 17 such mysteries. I’ll share three of my favorites from the list below:

• How does sound become hearing? We have technology that can show us sound waves, and we know that we have parts inside of our ears that process those sound waves, but then how does our brain process them?

• Is there anything alive in the human poop left on the moon? During the Apollo moon missions, astronauts went to the moon and, to save weight for returning to Earth, they left 96 bags of their own waste behind. Were the microbes inside their poop resilient enough to survive?

• Was there an advanced civilization on Earth before humans? Is it possible that someday we might find evidence, buried deep within the Earth’s crust, of an advanced non-human civilization that lived hundreds of millions of years ago?

Honestly, all of the questions were interesting to think about. Plus each one has a little write up next to it with some related information to get your brain moving. It was tough to narrow it down to only three, and if you asked me a week from now, I might even pick a different three. In short, go read the article for yourself. You’ll enjoy it. I promise. 😉

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• In 2026, NASA will send Artemis 3 to the moon. It will be the first human-staffed expedition to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in December of 1972. History aside, one of the most interesting aspects of the astronauts’ mission will be to set up a greenhouse on the moon - using plants they will bring from Earth.

• Inspired by self-healing tissue in the human body, researchers at Drexel University developed a self-repairing concrete material (i.e., cement) that they call BioFiber. BioFiber can heal itself, stop cracks from growing wider, and remain intact inside the concrete when there aren’t any cracks.

• Last year, the New York City government launched an AI-powered chatbot to help New Yorkers with starting and operating a business in the city. It’s now being reported that this chatbot has been giving out false information and sometimes even advice that is outright illegal.

• If you were impressed last month by Open AI’s teaser clips from its new video generator Sora, then you might enjoy reading about where AI moviemaking is headed.

• Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have recently made power moves in an effort to assert some kind of control over the booming AI industry. Lawmakers in the European Union passed the EU AI Act, while in the U.S., President Biden has ordered every US government agency to appoint a Chief AI Officer.

• One of the most common elements of action movies is the high-speed car chase scene. Those car chases also happen in real life, but we may be seeing less of them - in the U.S. at least. Some police departments there have begun using vehicle-mounted launchers that fire sticky, GPS-enabled projectiles at vehicles. This reduces the need to directly pursue fleeing suspects.

• Scammers have been using AI to create fake obituary notice websites that mimic real ones in detail and sentiment. Visitors to these sites have been falsely led to believe that they’re paying respects to a deceased individual. Instead, the scammers have used the sites to phish for personal data, solicit donations, and infect visitors’ devices with malware.

• 📽️🎞️ When it comes to network security and encryption, randomness is crucial. Without it, an attacker can eventually figure out the keys that a computer uses to encrypt data - and decrypt them. The problem is that computers are designed to give predictable, logical outputs based on a given input. Cloudflare has developed a truly creative solution for this. It almost seems fake (it’s not).

• Curious to know about all of the latest developments in CSS? This tutorial covers the newest CSS features for Spring 2024, offering insights and practical examples to help you stay up to date.

• I recently interviewed two of my colleagues, both of whom are software engineers, about how they broke into the industry, what their day-to-day is like, and more. One of them works 100% remotely, while the other works hybrid-style, with some of his days in the office and some at home. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a software engineer, then this is an insightful read.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"I call it the 'dot AI’ bubble, and it hasn’t even started yet."

– AI Emad Mostaque, recently ousted CEO of Stability (an AI company), speaking about the looming fallout from the massive amounts of money pouring into AI.

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $176,500 was the average bonus for Wall Street employees last year, down 2% from $180,000 in 2022. This decline occurred as the industry expanded its workforce and took a "more cautious approach" to compensation, according to a report by New York state's comptroller.

• 15 seconds of your voice is all that Open AI’s new voice cloning model needs in order to create a synthetic, reusable version of your voice. The technology has been in development since late 2022, and is currently being rolled out to a select pool of users in the form of a text-to-voice tool called “Voice Engine.”

• 30,000 in 3 months is how many times a fabricated software package was downloaded by developers. AI researcher, Bar Lanyado, noticed that generative AI has a tendency to invent non-existent software packages and decided to test what would happen if he created one of these, but with the caveat that he also injected a non-harmful malware into it. His experiment found its way into the GitHub repositories of several companies, including ecommerce giant, Alibaba.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

How good is your Python game? Take a look at the code snippet below and send me an email if you can spot the error. Please put “Code Conundrum” in the subject line. The first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Interested in sponsoring this section in a future issue? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

RunJS: A versatile desktop application for macOS, Windows, and Linux that provides a dynamic environment for exploring and experimenting with JavaScript and TypeScript. It offers instant feedback as you code, with live results shown per line, making it easier to understand what your code does. With access to Node.js, Browser APIs, Babel, TypeScript, and npm packages, RunJS caters to both learning and professional development needs. Its features, such as autocomplete, snippets, and type checking, enhance productivity, making it a valuable tool for developers seeking to quickly test ideas or debug code. It comes in both free and premium formats.

https://runjs.app/play

BlockNote: An open-source, block-based rich text editor designed for seamless integration into applications, offering both a robust out-of-the-box experience and extensive customizability. It supports real-time collaboration, customizable blocks, schemas, and plugins, with first-class TypeScript support and theming options. Designed to simplify the development process, BlockNote leverages the Prosemirror framework to provide a powerful yet user-friendly editing experience, making it ideal for developers looking to incorporate a sophisticated text editor into their projects.

https://www.blocknotejs.org/

🖼️ Image of The Month

We previously reported on Klein Vision’s Air Car in issue 135 of our newsletter, and now it’s back in the news again. The Slovakia-based developer of the world's first certified flying car has just granted a production license to Hebei Jianxin, a prominent Chinese company. This will give Hebei Jianxin exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute certified flying cars utilizing KleinVision's technology within a specific geographical region. So don’t be surprised if within the next few years you start seeing flying cars roaming the skies in China.

💬 Word of The Month

“Samfundssind” is a Danish word that literally translates into "society mind." It's the idea of putting the needs of society above your own. Given the stories we covered in this issue, especially the one about AI and the future of warfare, it’s an appropriate choice. All of us who work in tech, and particularly those who are working on emerging advanced technologies, should keep “Samfundssind” in the back of our minds. For what good will our work be, if we are not helping the societies we live in?

📊 Results of Last Month’s Poll

Judging by the results of the polls above, it looks like the overwhelming majority of us have recognized that AI-generated SPAM is polluting the internet. Only 8% of respondents said that they basically don’t care. (Is that you, Jacky Chou? Do you read Bizarro Devs? 🤔)

Well, if it’s any consolation, judging by the fifth story in the top ten links of the month section, it does appear that at least some governments are attempting to take action on AI. How much of that will extend to actual AI-generated SPAM is tough to tell. My guess is that they’ll probably be more concerned with other AI-related issues and will leave the SPAM filtering to Google, but we’ll see.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

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Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond. As mentioned in the intro, next month we’ll also be bringing you a double dose of Bizarro Devs so get ready for that.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin

March is here. It’s true. I checked the calendar just to be sure. What does that mean? Well, it could mean a lot of different things, depending on where you are in the world and what you’re into. But if you’re reading this, then it means you’re ready to read about all of the latest cool happenings in the world of tech, AI, web dev, science, and other related topics.

We’ve got your monthly dose coming right up, but before we get into it, we also want to let you know that for at least the next two months you’ll be getting a bonus issue of Bizarro Devs in your inbox. That’s right, in addition to the usual first-Tuesday-of-the-month issue, we’ll also send you another one mid-month. Stay tuned for that, but for now, please enjoy the one before you.

Here are the top stories:

• 🤖🏆 ChatGPT Defeats Humans In Series of Thinking Tests

• 🌎🦹 Globetrotting Millennial Caught Selling $7M of Weapons Parts to Russia

• 🌐☠️ Generative AI Is Killing The Internet But We Can Save It

Let’s get started!

📰 From the Newsroom

🤖🏆 ChatGPT Defeats Humans In Series of Thinking Tests

A recent study from the University of Arkansas pitted ChatGPT-4 against 151 humans in a series of thinking tests. The tests were as follows:

• In the Alternative Uses Task, participants, including ChatGPT-4, were asked to come up with as many uses as possible for everyday objects, such as a rope or a fork. This test measured creativity by assessing the ability to think of a wide range of uses for a single object, showcasing flexibility in thinking.

• The Consequences Task invited participants to imagine the possible outcomes of hypothetical situations, like "what if humans no longer needed sleep?" This task measured the ability to foresee a variety of consequences and implications, highlighting original thought processes and the generation of unique solutions.

• During the Divergent Associations Task, participants were required to generate ten nouns that are as semantically distant from each other as possible. For example, while "dog" and "cat" are closely related, "cat" and "ontology" are far apart. This task measured the capacity to think across different contexts and draw connections between unrelated concepts.

When all of the results were tabulated, ChatGPT proved to be victorious over the humans. It provided more original and more elaborate responses. However, despite its impressive performance, the study did note AI's limitations, such as its lack of agency and the necessity for human interaction to unlock its creative potential.

🌎🦹 Globetrotting Millennial Caught Selling $7M of Weapons Parts to Russia

Less than a month ago, if you stumbled upon Kristina Puzyreva’s glamorous Instagram feed, you might have assumed she was a digital nomad. She looks like a typical young millennial who has been fortunate enough to travel the world and take beautiful photos of her adventures. As it turns out, she was fueling her lifestyle through a bit more of an unconventional - and very illegal - method.

• Last month, in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, Puzyreva admitted her involvement in a sophisticated operation aimed at illicitly supplying Russia with critical components for drones and missiles. She pled guilty to charges of money laundering. Her husband and another man are also pending trial as her co-conspirators.

• Investigators had a critical breakthrough in her case when authorities traced the serial numbers of newly manufactured U.S. semiconductors to recovered Russian weapons that had been deployed in Ukraine. The serial numbers matched those that were in equipment purchased by Puzyreva and her husband through shell companies.

• According to legal documents, at one point she created 80 different bank accounts to manage $3 million of illicitly obtained funds, reflecting the extensive measures she took to conceal her and her husband’s financial dealings.

Puzyreva's case subtly echoes the saga of Hushpuppi, an influencer who flaunted an extravagant lifestyle which was secretly funded by cybercrime. He was also eventually arrested and charged with money laundering and fraud. Though Puzyreva was nowhere near as popular as he was (2.8 million followers vs 799), there is still a faint parallel between how both of them portrayed themselves a certain way on Instagram, while privately living a life of crime.

🌐☠️ Generative AI Is Killing The Internet But We Can Save It

Our last story comes to us from a fellow SubStack newsletter called The Intrinsic Perspective. In the aptly titled "Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI," writer Erik Hoel prompts us to question not only the direction in which we're heading, but also the kind of digital legacy we wish to leave for future generations.

• Ever since ChatGPT’s release on November 30,2022, Generative AI has taken the internet by storm. Hundreds, if not thousands, of AI-based apps and products have flooded the marketplace in an attempt to get a piece of the AI Gold Rush.

• On the flip side, equally money hungry individuals have leveraged these AI tools to produce massive quantities of garbage content at an unprecedented scale. These range from websites filled with AI-generated articles, created solely for the purpose of ranking and getting clicks, to YouTube channels pumping out nonsensical children’s “educational” videos that are anything but educational.

• The problem is so pervasive that it’s not just shady actors participating in it, but well-known magazines, newspapers, and even scientific journals aren’t immune to the problem. Collectively, it sums up to what can accurately fall under the term “tragedy of the commons” - a term borrowed from the environmental movement of the 20th century.

So what’s the solution here? Hoel argues that it’s clear that we cannot simply leave this up to the AI companies themselves, since they are financially incentivized to not do anything about. He thinks that we need a "Clean Internet Act" to protect our digital commons. That sounds reasonable, but what would this legislation look like? Would it ban AI tools altogether, limit their use, or what? It’s a well-meaning, albeit tricky proposition to execute correctly.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• Despite passing through six human filters—three authors, an editor, and two reviewers—across multiple countries, a scientific journal had to retract a paper containing ludicrous AI-generated images, including an oversized rat penis, highlighting a comedic yet alarming lapse in academic scrutiny.

• Last week on Monday, Deutsche Telekom introduced an AI-powered, app-less smartphone concept at the MWC conference in Barcelona. With the introduction of this model, they predict that in the future apps will be obsolete and devices will use AI to perform tasks and provide services directly.

• Researchers have created AI worms that can spread from one system to another, and which can potentially steal data or deploy malware, thus exposing significant security vulnerabilities in the architecture of generative AI ecosystems.

• For all of the math aficionados out there who also love JavaScript, the folks over at RunJS have taken the 17 most important math equations that have shaped our world, and converted them into JavaScript - with fun explanations for each one.

• Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an investment scheme by a scammer group called Savvy Seahorse. The scammers have been using Facebook ads and a fake ChatGPT with WhatsApp bots to deceive users into transferring funds to Russian banks through bogus platforms branded with names like Tesla and Meta.

• Magic AI, supported by a $117 million investment led by former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, is developing an advanced code-generating AI aimed at functioning autonomously as a "superhuman software engineer," surpassing current tools like GitHub Copilot and potentially revolutionizing software development.

• NVIDIA has released "Chat with RTX.” It allows users to run a personalized chatbot directly on Windows RTX PCs for quick, private interactions without sharing data with third parties or requiring an internet connection.

• 📽️🎞️ GitHub co-founder Scott Chacon recently gave a presentation at FOSDEM 2024, where he highlighted the many useful and sometimes overlooked parts of git. He ended it with a Q&A session with the audience, which unearthed additional gems of knowledge.

• Learning how to make a Chrome extension enables you to use your coding skills to simplify tasks through Google Chrome’s extensive APIs. Check out this step-by-step guide and get started with it.

• If you are new to WordPress theme development, you may be wondering how to build a block theme. There are actually multiple ways to do it. Learn four different approaches in this tutorial.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"

– Homer Simpson

🧮 The Numbers Game

• $500 USD is about all it takes to manipulate an election in the U.S. these days. That’s the approximate total amount spent by a political consultant to influence 5,000 voters to stay home in the recent New Hampshire Democratic primary election.

• Over 96% of the top one million web pages had accessibility issues in 2023. The implications of this are way more far reaching than you might initially think. Just from an ecommerce perspective, 56% of people with disabilities cited accessibility as the reason for choosing one online store over another. If you run an online store, it might be time to check your accessibility score.

• 1,400 Apple employees who were working on Apple’s ambitious electric car project (dubbed "Project Titan") are currently in a limbo state after the company decided to abandon the project. Some will be shifted to Apple’s generative AI projects, while the rest will have 90 days to find other roles within the company.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Heat.js: If you’ve been on the hunt for a great open-source heatmap tool, then Heat.js is worth checking out. It comes with zero dependencies and supports 51 languages. It’s also fully configurable, with options for custom triggers and flexible data breakdown. Export options include CSV, JSON, XML, and TXT, and you can import from JSON and TXT. Plus it offers 12 themes suitable for dark and light modes, configurable color ranges for views, and more!

https://www.william-troup.com/heat-js/

Husky: This is a tool designed to improve your git workflows by automatically linting commit messages, code, and running tests when you commit or push changes. It's lightweight, with no dependencies, and utilizes Git's core.hooksPath for modern, native git hook management. Husky supports cross-platform environments, including macOS, Linux, Windows, and is compatible with Git GUIs, node version managers, and various project structures like nested projects and monorepos. If you decide to try it, you’ll be in good company - it's widely used in over 1.3 million projects on GitHub.

https://typicode.github.io/husky/

🖼️ Image of The Month

The first prison photo of disgraced crypto financier Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) has been released, courtesy of Tiffany Fong, an internet personality who interviewed SBF more than ten times while he was on house arrest awaiting trial for the crimes that he was eventually locked up for. Tiffany was able to secure an interview with a recently released former inmate who was housed with SBF, and he provided her with the photo.

It’s an interesting juxtaposition when you place it right above a screenshot of SBF with messieurs Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. We all have our up and down swings in life, but how many people’s pendulums have swung from sharing the stage with some of the most powerful men in the world to sharing a jail cell with gang members? That’s a pretty wild life trajectory.

💬 Word of The Month

"Kaizen" (改善), a Japanese concept, epitomizes the philosophy of continuous improvement in small, manageable steps.

In the spirit of Kaizen, we are reminded that progress doesn't always necessitate sweeping changes or monumental breakthroughs. Instead, it champions the value of persistence and the incremental advancements that, over time, lead to significant breakthroughs and efficiencies.

This philosophy underlines the importance of a growth mindset, where ongoing effort, adaptability, and a commitment to excellence drive the evolution of technology and its applications.

📰 Bizarro Job of The Month

If you live in the Oradell, New Jersey area in the U.S., and you’d like an unconventional job, then you’ll be pleased to know that Doggy Deuce Removal Service is currently hiring a Full-Time Yard Poop Scooper.

If hired, you’ll be expected to visit homes from 7:00am to 2:30pm and clean clients’ yards of all dog poop with tools provided by the company. You will work independently and report back to the office, and to the owner of the company every day.

No details in the job listing about what reporting will look like. Will it be a spreadsheet with a running poop count? A before and after photo of each turded area? A QR code attached to each specimen prior to disposal? I guess those questions can be answered during the job interview.

🧑🏻‍💻👨🏽‍💻👩🏼‍💻 Tell a Friend or Colleague

If you’d like to help us grow, just use the refer a friend button below and if any of your referrals subscribe to Bizarro Devs, then we’ll not only be forever grateful, but we’ll also recognize your efforts in the following way:

• If two of your referrals subscribe then we’ll give you a shoutout in the conclusion of the following month’s issue.

• If twenty of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our ten must-see links of the month section*.

• If two hundred of your referrals subscribe then we’ll share an article or story of yours in our from the newsroom (top 3 stories) section*.

* The story or article needs to be relevant to the subject material we typically cover and is subject to editorial approval. In other words, it should be something that we would include in the newsletter naturally.

Refer a friend

Thanks for reading! If this is the first time you're here at Bizarro Devs and you enjoyed the content, then sign up here to join the fun for the rest of 2024 and beyond. As mentioned in the intro, next month we’ll also be bringing you a double dose of Bizarro Devs so get ready for that.

Until we see each other again,
– Martin